Read Online Spares by Michael Marshall Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Marshall Smith
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package of foodstuffs to ensure that it grows and develops in tandem with its twin. Sometimes the droids’ll get them to move around a bit, so their muscles don’t atrophy. Apart from that, all the spares know is one long endless twilight of blue heat, the mindless noise of other spares, and the slow blur of meaningless movement that takes place around them. Then, when a spare’s real-life twin is injured, or gets ill, the alarm goes off and an ambulance comes. The doctors find the right spare, cut off what they need, and then shove it back in the tunnel. There it lies, and rolls, and persists, until they need it again.
Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely his fault, but the way life is you’re supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two’s arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.
At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two’s. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.
At seventeen, Steven got a pan full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he’d been cheatingon. Not only cheating on, in fact: He’d stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much all right now, because they came and took his brother’s face away.
That was what the spares’ lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher’s shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.
They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They’re like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have are the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess—though they’re generally worse than nothing. There’s no “duty of care” crap in the caretaker’s job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night—for a small fee, of course. It was rumored that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.
When I woke, Ratchet was vacuuming the vomit up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semiporous rock. Eventually I got up, showered, and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I’d taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilled coffee all over the table.
But this time it was different. For the first time I wasthinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.
For better or worse, I made them.
That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I
Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely his fault, but the way life is you’re supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two’s arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.
At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two’s. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.
At seventeen, Steven got a pan full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he’d been cheatingon. Not only cheating on, in fact: He’d stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much all right now, because they came and took his brother’s face away.
That was what the spares’ lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher’s shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.
They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They’re like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have are the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess—though they’re generally worse than nothing. There’s no “duty of care” crap in the caretaker’s job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night—for a small fee, of course. It was rumored that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.
When I woke, Ratchet was vacuuming the vomit up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semiporous rock. Eventually I got up, showered, and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I’d taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilled coffee all over the table.
But this time it was different. For the first time I wasthinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.
For better or worse, I made them.
That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I
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