The Best British Fantasy 2014 Read online

  But Nicki doesn’t work like that. She’s not one of those girls, she doesn’t feel comfortable playing it that way. She just likes to keep her head down and get the work done, get out, get home.

  Her tablet pings once, flashes a notif, pings again and flashes a second. Two auctions won. Both lower than she’d like, both lower than the national minimum, but it’s a start. It’s a reason to get out of bed. Her mum shouts her again, she hollers back. Before she gets up though she’s got the CopWatch wiki open in front of her, checking her route. London Transport Police drone spotted at Mile End, actual cops doing spot checks at Bank. Fuck it. She’s gonna have to change her route – she’s not put credit on her legit Oyster card for time, and she’s only reasonably sure the three hacked ones in her wallet will get her through to Zone 1 from right out here in the forgotten sprawl of Zone 4. Even if they do, re-routing round these checks are going to put an extra half hour on her trip.

  She’s out of bed, pulling on clothes, before her mum calls her for a third time.

  0920, Oxford Circus tube station

  As she reaches the exit barrier at Oxford Circus there’s some kerfuffle on the other side, cursing and shouting, and as the crowd gets out of the way she can see what’s going on; security theatre breaking it’s own fourth wall as two cops wrestle with a guy and get him to the floor, gloved hands pulling back his hood to reveal the shock of his warped face, mutated beyond machine recognition into a disturbed alien mask. Nicki has seen it before, but it still surprises her that people would go to those ends, pumping their face full of QVC home Botox injections just to fool the cameras.

  Misuse can lead to dangerous long term side effects, the EULAs warn. Plus they just look fucking painful. Apparently the swelling goes down after a while, but the stretch marks remain – plus if that’s the only way you can do business inside Zones 1 & 2 then you need to start jacking your cheeks and forehead up with that shit all over again.

  Nicki’s in the barrier gate now, people crowding behind her, eager to get out or crane a look at the guy that’s pinned to the floor. She glances back. No retreat. She steps forward and pops her wallet on the reader, hoping the right card is out of the RFID blocking envelope. She holds her breath. The gate bleeps dully, the barriers swing open, and she’s stepping out, head down, pink hoody up, past the sprawled, screaming guy with the face made of balloons.

  1235, Pret A Manger, Oxford Street

  Two hour shift down and she’s not even seen a coffee machine, let alone some hipster barista she can flutter eyelashes at. She’s been stuck in a cold backroom sticking vacuum packed, pre-sliced organic cheddar into authentic French artisan baguettes she pulls out of a box from a bakery in Croydon.

  Her phone chimes in her pocket, vibrates against her hip. Shift over. She peels and drops plastic gloves into the bin and heads out to the main counter, is surprised by the sudden mass of bodies – it had been dead when she got here, but the early lunch crowd is in now. There’s the fucking coffee machine, steamy and hot and out of touch. She contemplates hanging around to see if she can grab the barista’s attention, but it’s getting too busy in here for that sort of shit, plus she needs to clock off and go, get to the next job.

  She finds the manager, he’d been all gruff and short with her when she turned up, but he seems more chilled now, friendlier – despite the fact the shop is getting busier. Maybe that’s why. He smiles and winks at Nicki, and she pulls out her aging Blackberry and scans the QRcode he shows her on his tablet.

  Another chime, cash register sounds kerching, kerching, kerching

  Shift completed!

  £١٢.٦٤ received.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Sandwich Stuffer Pro badge!

  1330, outside Starbucks, Oxford Street

  Nicki sits soaking up skyscraper-focussed rays, eating self made ham sandwiches out of tin foil wrappings, leeching wifi from Starbucks. Somewhere overhead rotors buzz, and she catches a glimpse of one of those Dabbawallah.net tiffin drones straining against it’s own payload as it vanishes behind cliffs of steel and glass, delivering Indian food to penthoused analysts in those tall, metallic tins that swing like bombs from its underside.

  She glances back down at her Blackberry, checks CopWatch again. More random stops on the Central line. Safer to walk. Lunchtime over.

  1415, Boots the Chemists, Holborn

  Boots is busy, a steady flow of post lunch shoppers. Occasionally one of them stops and asks her or one of the two other zed-contractors she’s stacking shelves with for directions to some product they don’t even recognize the name of. She smiles politely, tries to explain she’s zero hours, and offers to find someone to help them. Invariably the customers just tut and twirl on their heels, walking away from her mid sentence. The two other girls she’s working with keep their heads down, don’t even bother to look up. Maybe it’s the best strategy.

  The work is fiddly, annoyingly so. Usually shelf stacking is pretty straightforward – but this time they’re all on lipsticks and each one needs to be slotted into the correct little plastic hole on the display depending on colour and shade. Get it wrong and the shelf knows, and buzzes the app on her phone. She guesses it’s probably telling someone else too, building stats on her, trails of data ranking her for efficiency.

  She watches the other girls, both about her age. Similar clothes, with the oversized Boots t-shirts they were given over the top. She wonders how much they are getting paid – all the auctions are secret. Did they undercut her or the other way around?

  As she gazes at them the one nearest her, the one with the tight, straight black bob of hair, slips two of the lipsticks into a silver envelope and then into her jeans pocket. She recognizes the envelope, it’s made of the same material she keeps her Oyster cards in when she doesn’t want them to be scanned. RFID blocking. She pretends she hasn’t seen anything, turns back to the shelf and the lipsticks and the endless stupid holes.

  1845, Boots the Chemists, Holborn

  Nicki and the other two zed-contractors are in the manager’s office, waiting for her to get off a call. It’s nice in here, Nicki thinks. Warm and quiet. There’s chairs and one of those old desktop computers with the big displays. Nicki wonders what it’s like to have a job where you get to sit down all day.

  The manager gets off the phone, and near silently walks over to them, showing them each her tablet so they can scan the QRcode. Nicki is last, before her the girl with the bobbed hair and light fingers. Chimes and kerchings. Nicki glances a look at the surface of the girl’s two-seasons-ago iPhone, catches perfectly rendered text on its OLED screen.

  Shift completed!

  £١٩.٨٤ received.

  Nicki feels a rush of jealousy, anger. The girl is getting paid more than her. It’s pence, but.

  The manager reaches Nicki, presents her with the QRcode. She scans it. Chimes and kerchings.

  Shift completed!

  £١٩.٢٤ received.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Shelf Stacker Pro Level 2 badge!

  The manager thanks them all, and the three girls shuffle out of her office, Nicki at the back. Something stops her before she makes it through the doorframe though, a cold grip of rage and injustice. She turns back to face the manager, who looks at her over the rims of her Samsung branded spex.

  – Yes?

  Nicki looks at her, at the floor. Rage tinged with shame.

  – That girl, with the black hair. She took some lipsticks. Put them in an RFID bag.

  – I see.

  The manager touches the side of her spex, talks to an unseen security guard. She thanks Nicki and taps her clipboard-tablet, gives her another QRcode to scan.

  Chimes and kerchings.

  Achievement unlocked!

  Shop-cop Pro badge!

  £٥.٢٠ bonus received!

  2127, Wanstead

 
Nicki lies on her bed, surrounded by books from what’s left of Wanstead’s library. Dali, Gaudi, Picasso, Bosch, Warhol, Giraud. Her sketchbooks sprawl open around her, pencil scribbled designs sprawling across multiple pages; figures and textures, architectures and crowds, trees and towers.

  Nicki is on her tablet, transferring credit from the RetailWarriors app to her PayPal account. She checks the total. £3,467. Still not enough to cover the first term of graphic design at the Wanstead Community Academy.

  Maybe next year.

  She slides the books off her bed onto the floor, sets the alarm for 0645, and slips under the sheets. She’ll have to wake up early again, before even her mum calls her.

  DAVID TURNBULL

  Aspects of Aries

  Spring 2039

  On his approach to the checkpoint at the border Rik noted with some satisfaction that the baby in the back seat crib was fast asleep. Although he had heard that this happened sometimes Rik had never been lucky enough to transport a child that slept all the way through. Mostly he ended up with payloads that bawled their little heads off from beginning to end – puking and stinking up the interior of the car into the bargain.

  Smiling to himself he drove slowly past one of the border guards. When she saw that the words Infant Courier were stencilled in large letters on the side of Rik’s vehicle she waved him into the priority lane, holding up the queue of traffic to let him through.

  Rik pulled up in front of the security booth, applied his handbrake, and then checked that the armband with its Aries symbol was visible on the left sleeve of his bomber jacket. The clock on his dashboard read four thirty-four. He was making good time for his evening delivery. The baby was still sleeping, seemingly unaffected by the fact that the car was no longer in motion.

  Another guard stepped out of the booth. The symbol on his armband showed that he was a Sagittarius. Rik would have expected nothing less. He was still on his home ground in the Fire Zone after all. He rolled down the window as the guard scribbled down the car’s make and registration number.

  ‘Destination?’ he asked once Rik had shown him his ID card.

  ‘Earth Zone,’ replied Rik.

  The guard made a note of this.

  ‘Purpose?’ he asked.

  Rik nodded at the crib. ‘Have to deliver a baby born under the wrong star sign to its newly assigned parents.’

  The guard peered through the back passenger window.

  ‘D.O.B.?’ he asked.

  Rik told him his own date of birth and checked his paperwork for that of the baby. These were duly entered onto the guard’s sheet. ‘Just going to run all of this through the astrology software on my desk,’ he said. ‘Check if there’s anything untoward in the stars that might impinge on the rest of your journey.’

  Rik watched as the guard returned to the booth and sat down at his PC. The engineering department had given his car a full service the previous weekend, so Rik thought it highly unlikely that there was any real risk of a mechanical fault. But if the software identified a high probability of a road traffic incident it would be unlawful for the guard to allow Rik to proceed.

  A few months back the motorway portents had prophesied a blow out of his front tyre. As a consequence he’d been forbidden from travelling and had ended up stuck with an ill-tempered Pisces baby in a grotty B&B for four nights. Since that day he’d always taken the precaution of ensuring he’d fully replenished the supply of nappies, milk formula and gripe water stored in the car’s cargo space.

  Rik stepped out of the car to exercise his legs. After a moment the guard who had waved him into the priority lane came sidling up beside him. ‘I couldn’t do your job,’ she said. Like his her armband bore the symbol for Aries.

  ‘It’s essential work,’ he told her. ‘See that poor mite in the crib there? She’s a Taurus. Her paperwork says she was born on April 22nd. Can you believe that? Her parents didn’t even have the common decency to conceive her at a time that would ensure she was born under a compatible Fire sign. If the authorities left it to them to raise her who knows what kind of problems social services would end up having to deal with? That’s the kind of the thing the Grand Council of Astrologers has worked so hard to stamp out . . .’

  The guard held up her hand, halting him in full flow.

  ‘Actually it wasn’t that aspect of your job I was referring to.’

  She pointed to the twelve-foot tall, electrified fence that separated the Zones.

  ‘I’m a big supporter of segregation, believe me. That’s why I could never do a job that involved crossing over into the Earth Zone. It makes my flesh crawl just looking through the fence at all those creepy Virgos and Capricorns.’

  She gave a little shudder, emphasising her point.

  ‘I keep myself to myself,’ said Rik. ‘Get my job done. In and out – sweet as a nut.’

  ‘You go into Air and Water as well?’ she asked, nose pinching slightly as if there was a bad smell in the air.

  Rik nodded.

  ‘I do pick ups as well as deliveries. There are irresponsible parents across all the Zones. Never seems to be a shortage of displaced kids who need to be reassigned to a compatible family.’

  ‘Turns my stomach to think of a Taurus kid being born over here in Fire,’ she said and leaned in to the passenger window. ‘She got a name?’

  ‘Not yet,’ replied Rik. ‘They don’t like to give them names till they’re with their reassigned parents. It affects their equilibrium in later life.’

  ‘She’s definitely a Taurus?’

  Rik nodded again.

  ‘Poor thing. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’

  Her colleague poked his head around the door of the booth and waved his clipboard. ‘All in order. No negative portents predicted.’

  As Rik started the car’s engine once more the baby finally stirred a little. Through the mirror he saw a little pink hand clawing playfully at the air. ‘Soon be settled in with your selected parents,’ he said, releasing the handbrake and pushing gently down on the accelerator. The barrier went up. He pulled onto the M6 and passed from Fire into Earth.

  Summer 2043

  The room in which Rik was incarcerated was damp and dark.

  He could smell the mildew that speckled the walls. Somewhere water was dripping onto the concrete floor with a pronounced and regular smack. The room shuddered as the aerial assault above toppled yet another building up at street level. Dust and clumps of plaster fell onto his head and shoulders.

  He knew that if the entire ceiling came down he wouldn’t be able to dive out of the way. His wrists were bound to the arms of the chair. His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair. The chair itself was bolted to the floor of the room. He tried to blink away the dust that was getting into his eyes. The effort was painful. His eyelids were swollen and bruised from the beating he had taken.

  The light went on – suddenly illuminating his dank surroundings. Rik tensed. He knew what this meant. The light switch was just outside the door. He was out there; hand poised around the door handle, ready to enter – his torturer – his tormentor.

  The door opened with a slow groan.

  Rik felt his heart quicken.

  ‘Have you had sufficient time to consider whether there is anything you wish to tell me?’ asked the torturer. He was pushing a small trolley before him. An object covered in a white cloth sat on the trolley. Rik eyed it with growing consternation.

  The torturer smelled strongly of coal-tar soap. He was dressed immaculately in a starched white shirt and a plain blue necktie. His black shoes were polished to a fine shine. A Leo symbol was tattooed onto his left cheek.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, leaning toward Rik.

  His breath smelled of peppermint mouthwash.

  Rik was so parched that he felt as if his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth.

&nbs
p; ‘There’s nothing I can tell you,’ he managed. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  The room shuddered again as another bomb hit home.

  ‘You hear that?’ asked the torturer. ‘Your friends in the Earth Zone are striking at our homeland. Murdering innocent Leos, Sagittarians and Arians.’

  ‘I have no friends in the Earth Zone,’ said Rik. ‘The hostilities have more to do with the dissolution of the Grand Council than anything you think I might have done.’

  ‘But the Earth forces appear to have accurate intelligence,’ said the torturer and slowly circled him like some predatory insect. ‘They must have obtained their information from somewhere. Suspicion naturally falls upon people such as yourself.’

  He was behind the chair now and Rik found this all the more unsettling. Beads of sweat tumbled over his swollen eyes. ‘I’ve told you a dozen times,’ he said. ‘I didn’t give anyone any information. I didn’t have any information to give.’

  The torturer’s hands pressed down on his shoulders and gripped them as if he was about to offer Rik a massage. ‘It’s a fact, though, that you travelled regularly back and forth between Earth and Fire,’ he said, squeezing ever so slightly.

  ‘It was my job,’ said Rik. ‘I was an infant courier. I made deliveries and did pick-ups. I went into Air and Water as well.’

  The torturer went on squeezing his shoulders.

  ‘We are not at all concerned with what you may have done when you were travelling in the Air Zone,’ he said. ‘We are in an alliance with Air. But Water is an entirely different prospect. The turncoats in Water have thrown their lot in with Earth. You occasionally slept overnight in one or other of the Zones, did you not?’