I am counting the steps to my death when she calls.
"Where are you?" she asks.
"Around the 43 million mark," I say.
I think I may have missed a few when I took the call.
I need to remember to stop. To stop walking and counting. It's a simple enough rule to remember: if you can't count it don't take the step.
Each night I write the number down on a piece of paper on my bedside table. I fall asleep wondering if I've got it wrong, started on the wrong number, and might not wake to count the rest. Maybe the rest aren't mine in any case, but the number I must pass on to the next man just as this number was passed to me.
The man says "I'm here with your horses. Where shall I tether them?"
"My horses?!" she shouts, taking exception to his presumptive close. "What do I want with horses?"
She is lying face down on the cracked flagstones in front of her cottage.
"Horses are the future," he enthuses. "They bring progress and speed. No one without a horse will be anyone."
"What will they be then you riddling fool? Horses are dumb animals – just like you! – fine to look at but dumb. Is that the kind of future you think people want?"
"In the future," he continues undeterred, "everything will be done by horses. Everything will be made by horses. Everything made will be measured by horses. Power will be measured in horses. Horses will be everything."
She is still lying face down.
"What do I care about the future? If I don't get up from here I will have no future. Give me a hand and maybe I will talk about your future."
But he has turned on his heel and is already off, leading the glistening beasts away in search of an easier sale.
"Hands are the future!" she shouts after him. "Forget your horses. In the future everything will be measured in hands."
How will I know when I have arrived?
You will see a sign that bears the name of the place that you are headed for. The name of my place.
How will I know that it's a sign?
It will be a thing that stands out against the landscape in which it is set, something quite clearly 'other' that bears the letters of the name of the place that you are headed for.
How will I know they are letters?
They will be individual forms set upon this thing that stands out against the landscape in which it is set. The forms will be roughly regular in terms of height (though there may be exceptions) and width and weight. There will be enough of them to spell out the name of the place that you are headed for.
How will I know they are roughly regular and that the exceptions that you mentioned are exceptions and not the rule?
Look, when you get here, I will stand in the driveway and wave.
How will I know it's you? How will you know it's me?
Fredrickson was kneeling by the bath tub, hunched on the bare tiled floor, his skinny arms hugging his filthy knees.
"Why don't you get in?" I ask.
"I am cold and dirty," he says. "The water is hot and clean – so clean I can see the bottom. It's not the kind of place my kind would get on."
"You'd be surprised," I tell him, "of the transformational nature of water. Put yourself in it completely and in time and you'll find the water is quite as cold and dirty as you."
The hooligan bird is at the window again. Fixing me with a beady eye. Angling its head to show off its outrageous Mohawk.
Aggy. Aggy Oy.
The witless creature can't even get the chant right. I go to the window with a view to tell it, but the look it gives me chills to the bone, and I think better of it. It could probably smash through that pane in a flash and be upon me, slashing with that wicked beak.
I want to say "Crested Tit" but again, those aren't words I dare issue within earshot.
Willard is on the threshold.
He has a look on his face that I understand to be resignation.
"Help me," he says.
He must know that it's too late.
In an instant he burns bright as the sun.
I don't have arms or legs or any physical means to intervene.
I am only neurons.
As the light fades the riddling begins, almost imperceptibly at first as the sun dips below the skyline, but increasingly exerting its presence as dusk descends until it reaches its maximum at around 4am before its ever so gradual diminuendo and eventual silence.
It permeates every inch of the vertical resort. From the pods on street level all the way to the luxury thirty-seven square metre penthouse suites at the top - the ones reserved by the surgeons and top lawyers.
All thirty resorts in this sector follow the same template, housing some half a million of these so-called 'Band G' citizens: those whose roles were the first to have been automated – the accountants, tax inspectors, solicitors and teachers of the old world. (The rule followers as opposed to the rule makers).
All the megablocks experience the same phenomenon. It doesn't affect the mansions just a short flight over the basin, where the board members, governors, planners and information architects enjoy drinks on the terrace before dinner. Nor the garden cities further south where the plumbers, plasterers, police officers and nurses have their accommodation.
Only the vertical resorts. Of course, the other developments don't share the same architectural intention or construction. They don't share the same model of central distribution of electricity, communications, heating and cooling that the resorts use.
No one has been able to deduce the cause or identify the source.
Anxiety is up. The birthrate is down. Suicide rates have been increasing year on year since it began, shortly after the last block was finished.
On the cocktail terraces they say the riddling is working.
They are on the pitch. Surging forwards. Pushing through to the security cordon in front of the stage. I'm caught up in tide of bodies rising up and falling back. Fists punch the air, voices raised, agitating for something.
The pressure is palpable. Not just the weight of flesh bearing down, but the sense of imperative. The sense of purpose.
This is how movements start, I think, how history records the moment that a collective will solidifies into something concrete, how inertia flips to unstoppable force. I feel a wave of exhiliration.
Momentarily I stumble, falling in a sea of feet, lungs caved in, blinded by the sea of limbs. The crowd pushes on. The fight is bigger than the fate of one mere soldier in the fray. If I want to see the victory – whatever it is – I must battle for my own survival. I claw at the back pocket of a pair of jeans level with my eyes and, with a heave, regain my footing. Thrusting my arms above my head, I push up until I open up a patch of sky and can breathe again.
The sunlight hits my face, clean air fills my lungs, and for the first time I recognise the call.
"Encore! Encore!" they shout.
Then it hits me. They're not pushing for change. They just want more of the same.
Have you had some work done?
Yes, as it so happens I've had my kitchen refitted.
Ah I thought so! I thought it looked, well, how can I put this without offending you, less wrinkly than before.
My kitchen? You can see it from here? But it's more than a mile away!
Well I've had a bit of work done myself.
He says the punishment fits the crime, and the crime fits the perpetrator. When he was small though, the punishment did not fit. It was smaller still, and even strangling it in a clenched fist it could not squeeze into that darkest of places.
Only when the precentor showed him how anything can be made to fit did he understand. Pyjamas under cassocks, gin in the water jug, fingers in prayer books. It's a good life! You should try it!
He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the polished brass as he ascends the steps to the pulpit. Wrapped around the rail, his features distorted almost beyond recognition. He turns away from the brazen image, climbs the final step, and smiles beatifically at the upturned faces of the congregation.
"We have a place for eggs," she says.
"I know," he says.
If truth be told, eggs produce in him a kind of terror. It is the terror of nature. The terror of replication. Of reproduction.
And the place for eggs is the place for the presentation and the contemplation of the horror. It is the place where fumbling with mittened hands and closed eyes is the only way he knows.
He feels the same terror standing at the back of the classroom looking at the backs of the girls' heads. Lined up in egg-box rows. Blonde hair scraped across their ovoid forms. Fashioned by mothers who too had sat in rows like those. Propagating.
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