Migration

Maddie

After a tedious ten-minute wait in the counselling room, during which time Mo had counted every smudge and scuff on the seemingly pristine white walls and torn every finger nail back to reveal the soft, flexible new nail underneath, a Holler named Jordan arrived and read out the file that Zayn had submitted. Jordan was one of the Well-being Administrators and he spoke with a tone of slight self-righteousness, calm and fake concern that Hollers particularly excelled at. Mo didn't try to look penitent, aiming instead for an empty, neutral stare, but he was aware that he couldn't completely conceal the hatred from his face. He glared at him like a zoo animal instinctively tracking its keeper.

Hollers were so fucking pleased with their crappy immortality, so delighted with their digital perfection and control, Mo thought. But he always found them a little pathetic, deluded by their transcendence into thinking they were somehow better. Like you could just bus out of humanity, like going digital could wipe all your shit away. Mo saw their Dupes after they went in, babbling and thrashing and whimpering, telling secrets, revealing their thoughts, screaming and kicking, begging, masturbating and biting. He knew who these people really were. He knew it all went in the grinder.

He also knew those that AarBee had rejected – like Raleigh or the old Ghosts he'd befriended in the service lane behind his latest apartment – a major step down from his Prime/Code days. He knew that if he could choose an eternity with anyone, it would most likely be them, rather than the pious, deluded others. Not that it mattered anyhow, he had a feeling that by the time his Migration window timed out, AarBee would have already realised that Mo was just another virus best kept well out of the system.

"Whilst AarBee recognises that Dupes have no rights and therefore no crime has been committed," the irritatingly pleasant Holler explained, "intimate contact – whether intentional or not – is not acceptable and represents a significant risk to your health and subsequent performance."

He began to list the various diseases that Mo might have exposed himself too, before going into a detailed explanation of the psychological conditions he may now be at risk from. It was a joke. They actually thought that fucking someone you were about to shoot in the head was more emotionally damaging than the target of sixty Dupes per day. Minimum.

Every day.

Two years.

It was at this point that Jordan glitched. It didn't happen very often anymore, not like it had when AarBee was a new system. Mo had learnt all about it in the 'History of AarBee' classes in the first couple of months of his failed apprenticeship. Glitches were a sign that AarBee was struggling to keep up with the demand load, or that a particular process, perhaps the simplest thing like an eyelid blinking, had somehow fallen into an endless loop that caused the whole group of processes or objects to stutter. Occasionally, it was a sign of some more significant problem or change, like when Version One was hacked by outsiders and almost taken down, before Drones and implants had made AarBee more secure.

So, Jordan stood before Mo stuttering on the word "pain", his head nodding repeatedly backwards and forwards and the forefinger on his left hand wiggling over and over again, in a frozen mid-condescending gesture. He looked ridiculous. Mo used to find these moments hilarious, but today he just sat staring at Jordan, bored, waiting for him to resolve. For a moment it reminded him of driving the Vactrains. He used to love the route out to Delta Farm in the south, which ran through a vast forest of pine trees that would cut the sunshine up into a strobing burst that blasted into his cockpit for about twenty seconds. He would stare at it and hope it would make him fit, or wave his arm up and down in his seat and smile at how the light turned him into an old, very old, movie.

After a minute or so, Jordan vanished for a second before gracefully returning, refreshed and stable.

"I do apologise," he said, "it's very unfortunate when that happens."