Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 1

It was the middle of the morning, and Bradley was taking his sanctioned bathroom break.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It was the woman with dark hair. Four days had passed since the evening he had run into her outside the junk-shop. As she came nearer he saw her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable at a distance because the same color as her jumpsuit. Probably she had crushed her hand while larping in one of the big sound stages where the plots of news reports were 'roughed in'. It was a common accident in the Fiction Section.

They were perhaps four yards apart when she stumbled and fell almost flat on her face, emitting a sharp cry of pain. She must have fallen right on to her injured arm. Bradley stopped short. The girl had risen to her knees. Her face was a milky yellow color against which her mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more fear than pain.

A curious emotion stirred in Bradley's heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him. In front of him, also, was a human being, an attractive woman, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body, instinctively.

'You're hurt?' he said.

'It's nothing. My arm. I'll be all right in a second.'

She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. He noticed again how very pale she had turned. The paleness accentuated the fine dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose.

'Have you broken anything?'

'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a second, that's all.'

She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. As she stood, she regained some of her color, and appeared better. He was close enough to notice the tiny hairs on her upper lip.

'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a sprain. Thanks, Colleague!'

And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going, as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could not have been more than half a minute. Not showing your feelings was an instinctual habit, especially since they had been standing directly before a faceboogle when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up she had pressed something into his hand. She had intentionally given him something small and flat. As he passed through the toilet door he transferred it to his pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper folded into a square.

While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the stalls and read it at once. But that would be extremely stupid, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain the Corporate were watching continuously.

He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper casually on the desk, put on his glasses and plugged the thinkrite headphones back in. 'Five minutes,' he told himself, 'five minutes at the very least!' His heart thumped in his chest with frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was routine, the rectification of a long list of figures in a spreadsheet, not needing close attention.

Whatever was written on the paper, it must be political. As far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, the more likely: she was an agent of the TRUTH Police, just as he had feared. He did not know why the TRUTH Police would deliver messages like this, but maybe they had their reasons. Whatever was written on the paper could be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, some kind of trap. But there was another, wilder possibility he tried vainly to suppress: the message did not come from the TRUTH Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. The Deep State was real! Maybe this woman was part of it! Of course the idea was absurd, but it had leaped into his mind the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper. It was only a couple of minutes when the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. Even now, although he rationalized that this probably meant death, unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart fluttered in his chest like a trapped moth. It was with difficulty he kept his voice from trembling as he subvocalized figures into the thinkrite.