Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 1

It was a heavy muggy day in August, and the bomb alerts were flashing orange. Bradley Jones, his chin tucked into his breast in an effort to escape the foul smell, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Liberty Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of sulfur dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelled of greasy Big-R burgers and stale pot. At the end of it a color poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to a wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a yard wide: the face of a clown, with wild dyed hair, pouting lips and bright orange and white face paint. Bradley made for the stairs. It was no use trying the elevator. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the public electricity was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Firing Week. The apartment was seven flights up, and Bradley, who was forty-nine and had suppurating eczema sores above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the elevator-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures where the eyes follow you about when you move. THE RONALD IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it read.

Inside the apartment, a digitized voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with border walls. The voice came from a glossy black screen like a non-reflective mirror which formed most of the surface of the right-hand wall. Bradley muttered a command and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (called the faceboogle) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off. It would come alive with blaring news stories and commercials but was muted at the moment. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, his small body emphasized by the orange jumpsuit which was the uniform of the Corporate. His hair was very fair, his face naturally pale, his skin blotchy from coarse soap and the oppressive heat of a summer that never really ended.

Through the opened window, the world's heat pulsed in. The sun was shining and the sky a hazy orange-yellow, bleaching color from everything, except the posters plastered here and there. The bronze face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. THE RONALD IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the white-rimmed eyes looked deep into Bradley's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word: CORPSOC. In the far distance a drone skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was a private security patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the TRUTH Police mattered.

Behind Bradley's back the voice from the faceboogle was still babbling away about border walls and the reduction of the latest high temperatures. The faceboogle received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Bradley made would be picked up by it, as well as any movement within its field of vision. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being actively watched. But everyone knew they could monitor your feed whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, even in darkness, every movement scrutinized through infrared.

Bradley kept his back turned to the faceboogle. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. Across the harbor, the Conspiracy Department, his place of work, towered vast and menacing above the grimy landscape. Halifax, chief city of Harbor One, after all the upheaval of this century, was said to be the tenth most populous state of Amerussia. Recalling the forbidden names of Nova Scotia and Canada—words from before the Merger—Bradley guessed there had been a lot fewer people here then. It was all hazy, he was too young, but he assumed takeover by Corporate forces was due to collapse in the south. He tried to squeeze out his earlier memories, reminding him when Halifax had been better. It helped to think there were always these views of rotting houses, their sides shored up with timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with plywood, their gardens running wild, alongside derelict sites where sulfurous eco-bomb dust swirled in the air and hogweed grew over heaps of rubble. Here and there were places where the megastorms had cleared a larger patch and sordid colonies of camps and wooden dwellings had sprung up. But it was no use, he could not help it, everything that remained of his previous life was a sad reminder of how much had changed.