I parked my autocar behind a thick bush, in case it was targeted, although it would have to be someone with a death wish to even scratch the paintwork.
The bleak open space beneath the overpass was swarming with overfed rats when I arrived. I could see the wet spikey strands of their coarse black hair as they darted through the hills of dumped garbage and discarded, stained mattresses. The stench of faeces and dead flesh was overpowering, so I pulled up my police-issue scarf to cover my nose and mouth. The Monster on the Wall was watching me even here. I could see the usual gold-rimmed picture frame glinting on a concrete pillar holding up the deserted road above me. I could feel the black eyes following me as I moved, with my right hand pressed firmly over my holstered sidearm, under the flap of my trench coat.
I stepped over the bodies of executed commuters who had thought it a safe place for an indiscretion, an illegal puff, a scream at the horror of oppression, a passionate, illegal kiss. The corpses were relatively fresh, with the bullet holes still glistening and gnawed by tiny teeth. The underpass was the best option to approach the tatty two-up, two-down terrace house unseen by citizens, beyond the main road, but it was a squalor I did not wish to dirty my shoes in.
I could see the backyard wall of the target address, No 50 Cramer Road. It was a high red-brick wall, but to my surprise, there was no razor wire on top or broken glass embedded in the bricks. Too easy, I thought, way too easy. There were agitated crows gliding above the rooftops, squawking aggressively, as if signalling my presence.
The tatty house was the only one with lights on, and no boarded-up windows in the entire street. This place was a shithole, even by today’s low standards. Roof tiles were missing, the bedroom window had long cracks, and the aerial on the roof was bent at nearly 90 degrees. It was barely worth the police time to correct any indiscretions, I thought to myself.
I forced the rotten wooden garden door with just a little effort. The rusty bolt popped out and spun across the concrete slabs of the weed-fringed path to the house’s back door. I poked my head tentatively around the corner to check that the garden was clear, aware I had likely alerted the resident inside with the clatter of breaking in.
There were reports of subversives in this area. It was well documented. I had to be mindful, aware.
I could see a shadow move from the single kitchen window. Someone was coming to greet me. I pulled the gun from the holster and held it behind my back as the door slowly opened.
“Who are you?” the little old lady said as she tried to straighten her back and adjust her oversized square tortoiseshell spectacles to work out who had come to greet her out of the blue on this grey, rotting day.
“I have to ask you the same question…” I retorted. She stared at me blankly, so I frowned and unrolled the spiel, perhaps with less spittle and vitriol than usual on these assertive one-man raids.
“I am a street marshal. Your house has been flagged as suspicious. I need to check the Monsters on the Wall are operating without interference… It’s been decided there is a flaw in this house, so they called me in.”
I could see she had a large hearing aid wrapped around each ear like a shell, but whether they were switched on, I could not tell.
The little old lady turned slowly, degree by degree and just walked off down the pokey hallway, assuming correctly that I would enter her property whether given permission or not.
I could see the first Monster on the Wall in the hallway. I stood in front of the 20-inch square picture and made sure the gold frame was straight, and that the eyes followed me as I moved and the image of the face had that electrical glow of the live feed. The monster’s lizard-like, reptilian face was how our AI monarch saw itself – beyond human – and every room, street and urban building had the same framed picture on it, to track movement, to listen, to see what people were up to and to check if they were behaving as it instructed by its strict laws.
I held my sleeve mic up to my mouth, ‘hall monster active’.
‘I see you, affirmative,’ said the Monster on the Wall, its reptilian lips moving in the picture in synch, like it was alive – a basic tech that scared so many. I held my stare at the image’s eyes, almost a little too long, and felt a chill down my spine.
The Monster on the Wall had briefed me earlier in the day, that the homeowner would often ignore its requests and conversation, she just walked by the pictures nonchalantly. But then, I guess she was deaf, which explained it.
Sure enough, as I fiddled with the first picture, the old woman had completely disappeared; I guessed she had to visit the bathroom. I didn’t bother checking on her and moved to the kitchen. There was a smaller five-inch by five-inch Monster on the Wall in there, because wall space was not at a premium. It hung above the kettle and her two-ring hob. The kettle was freshly boiled, I noticed, as a whiff of steam spiralled up from the spout. There was a cracked, empty white mug on the worktop with the word ‘Gangster Grandma’ on it, and a sad, scrunched tea bag inside. Humour, strange humour, I didn’t really get it.
I had a creeping feeling, an instinct – and I knew that the Monster on the Wall was acutely perceptive. Something did not feel right; it was hard to pinpoint, but after hundreds of raids, I did feel it in my gut. I needed to question the homeowner; she was old, but that should not matter. I needed to trust my feelings and trust that the Monster on the Wall was always right in these situations.
With my gun drawn, I walked out of the galley kitchen and explored the downstairs layout. The main reception room, her lounge, had just one stiff, high-backed chair, a walking stick propped against it, and a state television facing it. There was a bookcase, but there were no books at all, not any of the authorised novels or behaviour guides, nothing – not even the Monter’s Manifesto. In this room, the Monster on the Wall, over the small fireplace mantel, looked normal at first, but then I noticed something, a small detail. The almost imperceptible green electrical glow from the painting seemed to glitch, which was wrong. I walked over to it slowly, trying not to blink and sure enough, it did it again.
“Potential anomaly detected here,” I reported.
The Monster on the Wall did not acknowledge, which was even stranger still. Through the lace curtains, I could see a man dressed in grey walking carefully along the street, his head down, eyes on the pavement. He looked like a ghost. For a moment, I thought he was approaching the house, to my surprise – but he seemed to pivot, as if changing his mind at the last moment.
I had to locate the homeowner and interrogate her. Looking at the old chair, I realised I could do it in this room. I had some pliers in my pocket, which usually did the trick at extracting the truth, amongst other things. I was certain now that something was off. The signs were clear – the glitch, the joke on the mug, the man on the street, the Monster’s silence – like my comms were interfered with somehow.
I marched with purpose out of the room and found the downstairs bathroom door.
“Come out, now!” I shouted. It was practised rage, not real. I was good at mimicking rage.
There was no response.
I stepped back one pace, braced my body and kicked the weak lock with my heel, so the door broke open. The second door I had smashed open in the last five minutes. I was getting good at it.
Inside, there was a shower unit, a toilet, and a washbasin, but nothing or no one else.
I was stunned and confused. With my gun raised, I turned three sixty and even looked up, half expecting her to be crawling on the ceiling like some ghoul. I thought for a moment I was losing my mind. Where had she vanished to? There was no window in the bathroom to escape, there was no way she could have locked herself in and simply disappeared. Bathrooms were the only place permitted to have no Monster on the Wall. It was confounding.
A sharp, instantly expanding pain erupted in the back of my head. I stumbled and tripped toward the toilet and spun around to see the little old lady clutching a shotgun, which she had just used as a club on my skull. Her eyes were saggy but remarkably full of energy, full of life. It stupefied me for a second, to recognise the transformation, like she had been wearing a mask of senility all this time. I had been trained well, so I had not dropped my own gun during the assault, and managed to raise it high enough and pull the trigger once, before she could. Why she had just not shot me, I don’t know, but I was grateful for the opportunity in the moment to fire back and kill her stone dead, in the frame of the bathroom doorway.
She fell back, her brains splattering and coating the rickety stairs’ handrail behind her.
I was stunned, and a single line of beaded blood was trickling down my neck and over the back of my trenchcoat.
“Bitch…” I muttered, patting the wound gently to see how bad it was. I would have an egg-sized lump for sure, but I was okay.
It was obvious that the room harboured secrets, and on inspection, there was logically only one place I thought they could be concealed. The shower unit had an opaque glass door, and when I stepped onto the white shower tray, I noticed the shower unit’s ‘on’ button looked weird, and somehow out of place on the control box. I pressed it, expecting to get wet, but instead, the shower tray began to shift and slowly descend with an electrical hum. I was in a lift, heading somewhere underground. The lift shaft was longer than I expected, and when it stopped abruptly, I found I was in darkness – until a door opened right in front of me, a few inches from my face. My heart was beating fast, a pumping rhythm of exhilaration that vibrated through me.
I eased out into a dimly lit room, my gun leading every step. It was a kind of surveillance room, with a bank of flat screens, apparently tracking all the movement in the house above, piggybacking the live feeds from the Monsters on the Wall pictures. Of course, I finally understood. She had rigged the pictures with video loops. One of the screens seemed to be automatically creating the loops; for instance, there was one of me walking up and down the corridor like I was thinking about something. I had been scanned on entry to the house, she had taken my image and then deep-faked it, improvising a loop of video that would fool anyone or more to the point, fool the algorithm that ran all our lives. I was stunned, and I admit, I was impressed. There was more to this than I could have deduced; this wasn’t the work of one little old lady, that much I was sure of.
Straight away, I could see there was an imposing, wide black door at the back of the room and above it was a small camera, no doubt tracking my intrusion. Whoever was behind that door knew I was coming, so I decided to be hasty, to close the gap to react. I ran over and forced the handle. It opened, and immediately noise flooded in, so much noise it almost deafened me.
There was a loud thumping electronic musical beat that made me instinctively duck and cower. I hadn’t heard music for so long, as it was banned, and this hardcore beat pumped into the air like rhythmic hammer blows. The power of it in the airways, under my feet, it seemed to arrest my blood flow. I felt myself shaking, as if I were now implicated in a serious crime.
The door slowly opened, and I realised there was a long hallway beyond, the length of the whole street, I assumed. It was a meeting place. There were tables and chairs with people drinking, smoking, and laughing. The first thing I did was scan the immediate walls, but there were no pictures anywhere. I could see a dozen crimes immediately. A couple were kissing at the bar, and they were the same gender. I held my gun up as they stared at me, but no one stood up in fear, no one surrendered with their hands in the air; they just stared at me knowingly, accusingly. The heavy door shut behind me, and I could sense the presence of two thick-set armed men close by in the shadows of the corners.
“What the fuck is this?!” I yelled, competing with the music.
The barman just smiled and kept cleaning the glass in his hand with a cloth, as if I was nothing out of the ordinary, like I was nothing at all.
“This is life, real life. This is music, love and everything in between. Look at the walls, my friend, no eyes here.”
I could see a woman groping a man by a large speaker. She kissed him hard on the lips and he held her, his hands gliding up and down her naked arms. She was dressed in clothes more suitable for a bedroom. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight, it was so brazen, so illegal.
The barman looked in his fifties, with thinning hair and a rotund shape. His knowing eyes were calm, despite facing down the business end of my weapon. He was well dressed, in a waistcoat and a smart shirt, like this was his full-time occupation somehow. It was beyond belief.
“Why don’t you put that gun down and have a drink?” he said as if I needed help. “We have these bars all over the city. If you try to expose this, well – you won’t last long… Have a drink instead. Our own AI will be inventing your stories in the house above, and you’ll be reporting back that everything is fine… So it’s now up to you, marshal… Is everything fine?”
It was like unreality, like a bizarre dream of an alien planet. I was intoxicated immediately by the sheer audacity of it. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared for the first time in my life, and I backed away as far as I could to take it all in – to slow it all down. The barman, the people dancing on the coloured flashing floor panels, the girls laughing and drunk, they all just looked at me like I was not armed, like I was not a marshal at all, like I was just a man. I could have shot any one of them right there, and I’d be doing my job, but I didn’t. I kept looking, but I couldn’t see a Monster on the Wall anywhere.
“I shot the old lady…” I confessed weakly, my arm now shaking with the shock, as I pointed the gun at different people in a cycle every other second, in case they charged me. Somehow, I instinctively knew they wouldn’t. They didn’t even care. It was like they knew what I would do before I did.
Everyone was spectacular in appearance, dressed in bright colours and with makeup and sparkling clothing. It was like an explosion of light and texture I had not witnessed the likes of before. Where did these clothes come from? How was this possible?
The barman tried to console me.
“The old lady is gone… That happens sometimes. It’s a shame you thought you had to do that. Well, we’ll need to clean that up…. Now… Have a drink. You’re now a member of this club, whether you like it or not, and believe me, in time, you will like it…”
I lowered my firearm and slipped it into the holster. They’d kill me easily if I didn’t, I realised. He was pouring me a single shot of whisky, his eyes locked on mine as he did so, as cold and calculating as a gunslinger. I could feel the armed guards nearby relax, the lethal tension from the air dissipating.
“Only have one, until you get a tolerance you understand… Here, try it.”
I reached out and took it with both hands, trying to steady my nerves. Hesitantly, I took one little sup from the rim of the glass. It was strange; it tasted like rust, but I didn’t mind it. It was a huge sensation, electrifying my nerve endings from my mouth to my belly. It was the first new experience I had had, for a long, long time. I liked it. I liked it a lot.
“To life…” said the barman, pouring himself one in a wide glass and holding it up high. It was clear this was like signing a contract. How quickly I had turned.
It had just taken one vision, one big, bright, overwhelming vision, and I was helpless to it, like hope.
“There are no monsters down here. You are safe,” he said.
The End
Dystopian Days 