The Block Read online

  For Hollie. Books, eh? Who’da thought it? (You’da thought it.)

  Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

  THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD, MARGARET ATWOOD

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  After the War

  Day 6

  Day 7

  In the Block

  Day 31

  Day 32

  Day 34

  Day 36

  Day 38

  Day 39

  Day 41

  Day 43

  Day 45

  Day 49

  Out of the Block

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  In Purgatory

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 5

  Day 1

  Day 6

  In the ARC

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Defeating Happy came at a cost.

  As I lie here, staring up the ceiling of my home on the 177th floor of the Black Road Vertical, I can’t help but ask myself if we could have done anything differently.

  Pander had taken her own life after Happy had uploaded itself into her, Pod had been stabbed to death by an Alt loyal to the AI’s cause, Malachai had died in the battle on City Level Two, and Igby had been shot out of the sky while flying to retrieve a key card that would allow us access to the underground bunker where Happy stored its servers.

  But it had been Akimi who had made the ultimate sacrifice, running into the power storage facility with plasma grenades, blowing herself up, along with Happy’s life support system. After that, all we had to do was stay alive long enough for the AI’s stored energy to die.

  “What are you thinking about?” Kina asks, walking into the room and lying beside me.

  “Just … everything,” I reply. I smile because she’s still alive, and immediately feel selfish for it.

  “Me too,” she says, her hand running through my hair. “It feels like it’s all I ever think about.”

  “Do you ever feel guilty?” I ask. “That we survived and everyone else …”

  “Yes,” she says. “All the time. I dream about it; I wake up most nights and …”

  She trails off, tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” I say. “I imagined the end of the war being beautiful. I imagined us all together, all alive.”

  “They died fighting for what they believed in,” Kina says. “Fighting for each other, and for us, and for all of humanity. In the end all of us were ready to die for the cause, so—in that way—their deaths are noble, courageous. They’ll be remembered forever as heroes.”

  “I know,” I reply, “but I’d give anything for them to be back here, with us.”

  “Me too,” Kina says, and kisses me on the cheek. “Try to get some sleep.”

  She lies back in the darkness, and I continue to stare up at the ceiling.

  I don’t know how long I lie there for, but before I fall into a restless sleep, I think to myself, When is it going to happen?

  When I wake, the sun is rising.

  I get up, careful not to wake Kina, and move from the bedroom to the kitchen.

  There is no electricity now, not after the firebombing that came at the very end, and the only water is from the rain collectors, but we have to ration that carefully, as Happy tried to poison the rain with its last few moments of battery life. In doing so, it affected the weather permanently. Now we get mostly scorching-hot days, and five-minute bursts of heavy rain once every three or four days.

  As I half fill a bottle with water, I look out over the city. It’s a wreck. Some areas are still smoking and smoldering, some buildings still crumbling. The burning-hot sun and lack of rain has turned the river into a wide path of cracked mud that snakes through the burned-out city.

  I change into a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I pull on a pair of boots and leave the apartment as quietly as I can.

  As usual, by the time I’m halfway down the 176 flights of stairs, I tell myself that Kina and I are moving into a house on the ground floor today! But I know that once we start looking around, I’ll feel nervous again. Not just nervous but anxious, as if the act of leaving my old home would somehow be sullying the memory of my deceased mother, father, and sister.

  I shake off the thought and continue down and down until, finally, I reach the front doors of the building and push my way out into the heat and the blinding light.

  I move carefully through the rubble, through the charred streets and hunks of melted metal that might have once been vehicles, until finally I come to a warehouse near the factory district.

  I have to be careful now; I’m not the only scavenger around. There are many survivors of Happy’s war—some Alts still bent on carrying out their artificial leader’s orders, some Regulars who survived because they were on the drug Ebb at the time, even the occasional Smiler, humans driven crazy by the bioweapon that was delivered through the Earth’s rain supply. Most Smilers are dead now, though. Those of us who only want to survive have not yet found a way to communicate, and we avoid one another, scared that each living soul is a threat.

  I enter the warehouse through a hole that was blown into the outer wall at some point during the final moments of the war. The entire place has been picked over and ransacked, leaving the shelves almost empty, but there are still some vacuum-sealed packs of fruit and sacks of rice.

  Once I have gathered some basic supplies and secured them in my backpack, I move down to the last part of the river that still had enough water in it to sustain life, and check my traps for fish: nothing.

  I make my way back to the Black Road Vertical, moving carefully, quietly, from building to building, listening for movement, watching for signs of life. I make it safely back to the impossibly tall building and begin climbing the stairs. Now, with the added weight of the food on my back, I have to take several rests along the way. Once I reach the 177th floor, I leave the bag at the front door of our apartment, and carry on up to the roof.

  It’s strange being back up here, back where my sister and I stood in shocked silence as the boy had fallen to his death. It had been Molly who had pushed him. She’d had no choice—he had a gun pointed at her head—but self-defense wouldn’t have worked in a court of law, as it was us who were robbing him in the first place.

  I had taken the blame; I had confessed to the murder of Jayden Roth and had been sentenced to death.

  That’s where it all began, I think to myself, staring at the spot where the boy had fallen. I was sent to the Loop, became a test subject for the Smiler vaccine, and I survived the war.

  I look to the other side of the rooftop, the place where my father—infected by the Smiler disease—used his last reserves of life to tackle one of Happy’s hosts off the edge and save my life.

  Defeating Happy came at a high cost.

  I can feel the surge of emotion inside me and I fight it, push it down and away, and focus instead on the garden.

  It had taken two days of almost constant work to carry up the wood that makes the frame of the garden and the soil that fills the frame. I had planted carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and green beans. There are signs of life, small shoots growing out of the tomato patch and tiny leaves sticking out of the soil where the carrots are.

  I use the bucket to scoop the smallest amount of water I feel I can spare out of the rain collector and pour it onto the vegetables.

  When is it going to happen? I think, looking out over the city, breathing in the warm air. When is it going to h
appen?

  I think back to the Block, the most torturous, cruel, agonizing place I have ever had the misfortune of being inside, and I think about how I got out of there. Has it really been twenty days? Twenty days since the explosion, since the gunfire, since the screams and yells? The entire building had been bombed by Pod and Igby. They had calculated the exact amount of explosives required to blow away the back wall and leave the prisoners alive. Then they—along with Pander, Akimi, and my sister—had stormed the building, killing the guards and dragging us from the paralysis beds.

  Twenty days … so much has happened since then, and yet it feels like nothing has changed at all.

  I look out over the city, to the bend in the river where me, my sister, and my parents used to go on sunny days. I look to the horizon, where the morning sun blazes as it climbs ever higher.

  When is it going to happen? I wonder.

  All of this—this burned-out city, this burned-out planet—it’s all futile, the human race rising up out of the rubble seems impossible, and yet, it doesn’t matter. It’s not real.

  This is not real.

  I breathe in deeply, feeling the warm air in my lungs, and make my way back through the narrow doorway, down the wooden steps, and back into the corridor on the top floor of the Vertical.

  I walk down to floor 177 and back into my old home, the place where I grew up.

  Kina is in the living room, writing in her journal. She looks up when I enter the room.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hi,” I reply.

  “I’m writing again,” she tells me, looking almost guiltily down at her words. “I think it’s important—people should know what happened, future generations, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  She looks at me and smiles. “Luka, I don’t want to bring up bad memories, but I want to make sure all of this is accurate. Can you tell me—”

  “Wait, Kina,” I interrupt, “please don’t.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, frowning.

  “Don’t ask me, please.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, half laughing, as if I’m being unreasonable.

  “Kina, if you ask me that question, then this is all over.”

  “Luka, I don’t know what you’re talking about; you’re scaring me a little.”

  “Yes, you do understand,” I say. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, because you’re not really Kina, we’re not really in my old home, the war isn’t over, and I’m still in the Block.”

  “That’s crazy. Luka, that’s crazy! You can’t really believe that?”

  “It’s not a question of belief,” I reply, “it’s a matter of fact. You’ve been meticulous this time. You’ve planned it out, played the long game, and there were moments that I almost let myself believe it was real, but it’s not real. It’s all a mirage, a ploy to get vital information out of me. So, you know what … go ahead, ask your questions.”

  The look of concern on Kina’s face turns to one of vacancy, but there is anger deep in her eyes. “Where were Pander, Pod, Igby, and Akimi hiding on the day of the Battle of Midway Park?”

  I sigh, take one last look around, and shake my head. “I’ll never tell you.”

  And, after twenty days, the simulation ends.

  The false reality that surrounds me begins to melt away, and the heat of the sun is gone, replaced by the nothingness of the paralysis bed inside my cell in the Block.

  And now I’m here once again, unable to move, unable to feel anything at all. Staring at a single spot on the white wall, rage and pain warring inside me, hopelessness overcoming me.

  When the harvest begins, all that exists is fear.

  It feels like an eternity before it ends, before the nanotech releases its grip on the parts of my brain that access terror and panic, before my heart begins to slow and my muscles relax.

  Back in the Loop, the prison I was in before the end of the world, the harvest lasted only six hours, and when it was done we were left alone in our small soundproof cells. It seemed horrible at the time, but compared to the Block it was like heaven.

  The harvest tube stays in place while the water comes. It rushes in from the ceiling, smelling of acrid chemicals and bleach. As usual, I consider letting it drown me: pushing all the air out of my lungs at the moment the tube fills, and waiting to die so that I don’t have to face another day of this hell.

  But I don’t.

  The tube fills with water until I’m completely submerged. Time passes—ten seconds, twelve—and then the water drains away, throwing me to the floor once again.

  The air comes next, so hot that my skin feels like it’s about to blister and burn. Once I’m dry, the tube lifts and retreats into the ceiling.

  The harvest is over, and what comes next is just as terrible.

  I wait, naked on the floor, my arms magnetized together behind my back by the implanted cobalt in my wrists.

  It’s been sixteen days since Happy, the all-powerful artificial intelligence that first ran the world and then destroyed it, tried to trick me into giving up the location of my friends. Happy somehow accessed my brain and convinced me that I had been broken out of this prison by Pander, Malachai, and Kina, but I figured it out; I realized that none of it was real despite how convincing the simulation was. I took them to the river near the center of the city and savored the memories of spending time there with my family when I was young. Me, my sister, my dad, and my mom would go to the riverside on summer days and spend hours playing, swimming, talking, and just being together as a family.

  It took the AI about four minutes to realize it had been deceived. Since then Happy has tried every day to trick me into giving up information. It uses different tactics: fear; coercion; bargaining; confusion. Then it tried a twenty-day simulation of a life after the war, a life with Kina.

  But I will keep my secrets guarded. I will not let Happy win.

  The technology that Happy uses to try and draw information out of me is the same technology they have been using to keep my mind from slipping away in the monotony of the Block. They call it the Sane Zone.

  * * *

  I’m still breathing heavily from the harvest and the water when the hatch in my cell door opens.

  Immediately I moderate my breathing, slow it right down.

  The guard on duty today is Jacob. Good. In the last few days I have managed to get through to Jacob; he has listened to me, hesitated before beginning the harvest, looked at me with real regret and shame in his eyes.

  “Inmate 9-70-981, be informed that I have a loaded weapon and I am prepared to use it if you do not follow my instructions. Am I understood?”

  My head is turned in the direction of the cell door and I see Jacob: young, skinny, fashionably long hair. His eyes glare at me down the barrel of an Ultrasonic Wave rifle. I don’t move, don’t blink, don’t react to the gun pointed at me.

  “Inmate 9-70-981. Please lie down on the bed so I can activate the paralysis … Inmate 9-70-981 … Luka, are you okay?”

  Still I don’t move. I lie on the floor of my cell, and try to keep my breathing as shallow as possible so that Jacob might think I’m not breathing at all.

  “Luka?” He sounds unsure now, scared. “Oh shit!”

  I hear the spin lock on my door opening and see the door swing inward. The young guard runs over to me, sliding to his knees and rolling me onto my back.

  “Luka! Luka!” he calls, slapping my face to try and rouse me.

  I want to grab for his USW rifle, I want to spring into action and break out of this place, but the energy harvest has left me drained, so I have to wait for the healing technology inside me to work. The important thing is, I’ve tricked a guard into entering my cell.

  I take a sudden deep breath, as if I’ve just come to, and look at Jacob with confusion on my face.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he replies, his voice shaking. “I think you stopped breathing.”
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  “Gods,” I say in hoarse voice, “I wish I’d died.”

  “Don’t say that, don’t be saying things like that.”

  “Why not?” I ask, stalling for time, waiting for my strength to return. “Death is a thousand times better than this place.”

  “Come on, please, don’t say things like that!” he repeats. “I should call a medic drone, make sure you’re all right.”

  His eyes begin to scan left and right, activating menus on his Lens.

  “No, no,” I say, sitting up. “I’m fine, Jacob, really. I think I just fainted.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I say.

  “I’m s’posed to call a medic drone if something like this happens.”

  “Jacob, I’m okay, I promise.”

  He sighs. “If you’re sure, Inmate 9-70-981.”

  “Oh, it’s 9-70-981 again, is it?” I say, laughing. “What happened to Luka?”

  “I was panicking,” he tells me. “I’m not s’posed to call you by your real name.”

  I can feel my strength coming back now, feel the exhaustion ebbing away.

  “Well, if you’re all right, I need you to lie down on the bed. I have a schedule that I need to stick to. If I’m late again I’ll be in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”

  I get to my feet—it takes enormous effort after the harvest robbed me of all my energy, but I can already feel my power coming back. I can feel my body healing itself, every micro-tear in the fibers of my muscles, every strained tendon and every scratch. This is a new feature, a piece of Alt tech in my body causing me to heal at inhuman speed. We all have this ability now, all the inmates from the Loop and the Block—this way they can reuse our energy over and over again. We are the rechargeable batteries that power the machines that will end humanity. They heal our bodies with tech and keep us from going crazy with the Sane Zone.

  I stand beside the bed and turn back to Jacob. I’m still completely naked, and yet unperturbed by that fact, conditioned by now not to care. I don’t move, just stare at him.

  “You have to lie down, Luka,” he tells me.