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  Mrs Carter sat with a look of horror.

  ‘I’m teasing, Mrs C.’ Emma laughed again. ‘That’s not how these things work. That could never happen. Never ever! The machine just doesn’t think like that.’ She downed the last of her tea and rose to her feet. ‘In fact, the machine doesn’t really think at all. That’s the beauty of it!’

  Krištof was standing beside them now. He was looking down at the box that supported the tea tray, a paper label protruding from its top edge. Mrs Carter tugged at the label till with a small ripping noise it came unstuck. She scrumpled it into her palm at once.

  Krištof shrugged and headed back out. Emma followed at an easy pace.

  ¶

  Outside it seemed now that regular noise had returned to the neighbourhood. Emma stood for a moment, listening, taking time to notice things this time round.

  It wasn’t particularly special. There was indeed a dog barking somewhere down the street. There was the sound of small birds chittering. There were insects in the grass. There was distant traffic noise. It was all very normal, though Emma considered how it being there now was in no way evidence of it having been there previously, with what continues not being a reliable proof for what has passed. Though if there had indeed been a change, then how quickly the animals returned, how quickly they accepted the disruption.

  At the lorry the last of the items had been loaded. Stefan was closing the inner door as Emma mounted the ramp and reached forward to pick up her controller. She glanced through the gap into the compartment just before it was sealed and her body stiffened. She almost cried out for Stefan to stop.

  She had seen a face. In among the boxes and crowded items of furniture, there had been a human face, still and serious, staring sternly back out at her. But in that same fraction of a second in which she noticed it Emma also understood it for what it really was: a large portrait. Nothing more. Just an old oil painting, its heavy ornate frame propped against the rest of the items. Not flesh, but linseed and pigment, taut cloth, wood and gilt.

  How curious that in all the many jobs she’d done with the removals firm Emma had never once experienced such a sight. But she was glad too that she had at least noticed, that her reactions and her attention to detail were as heightened as she required them to be. She smiled. It would certainly be a nice shock for the receiving team when the transfer was complete and they opened the doors their end to find that same face staring angrily out at them.

  Emma locked the system and ran the analysis. The usual noises started up from within, like a giant washing machine turning over, grinding and rolling and tumbling its heavy load.

  Emma glanced down the street to where Krištof and Stefan were perched on a low brick wall, smoking and chatting, the blue-grey streams of smoke drifting on the hot air, dispersing their fine particles into invisibility.

  The analysis stopped with a loud inelegant clunk, as though after all that tumbling the contents of the lorry had at length settled into a singular comfortable heap. Emma began looking through the pages of code.

  Despite her practised speed and almost lazily scanning eyes, the anomaly was glaring when she saw it. She’d only ever seen such things in her initial training, and those were merely simulations, unreal. But this was as obvious as a whole wall of checkerboard with just a single square the wrong colour. Her eyes fixed on it at once. It was no more than numbers and letters, just like the rest of the code, but still it was like a gaping hole in an otherwise perfect net, or a ladder in a stocking, or a scar. It made no sense. It had no purpose being there.

  Emma went to unlock the chamber door, but stopped herself. She was curious. The machine itself was ready to send. The machine itself didn’t think anything was wrong. The machine itself didn’t think at all. Only Emma had noticed the error, if error it could be called. What might happen if she gave the all-clear to send? What might come out the other end? She drew back her hand and looked at her controller—then pressed the button to run the analysis over again.

  She glanced down the side of the lorry. Her colleagues hadn’t moved. They either hadn’t noticed that the machine was going through its motions once more or they simply didn’t care. It made little difference to them either way; their work was to load or unload, what happened in between was not their preserve.

  No heavy clunk this time when the analysis stopped. Its noises had in fact been altogether smoother, more regular. The ear played tricks, of course. There were so many overlapping sounds, phasing in and out with each other, nothing ever sounded the same twice. Emma checked the readout. It was different. The order was different. The same information but less random in its layout, as though the machine had this time understood its contents better, as though it had refined that initial scan. But that was not how it worked. The machine did not understand. It did not learn. Every instance was new and unique. Every instance was in itself the only instance.

  There was no anomaly this time round. Emma gave the pages a second readthrough, but it was all as clear as it could be. There were no errors. The analysis was perfect. And the red diode on the controller was lit. They had a clear connection window. They were all set to go. Emma took a breath and held it. She pressed send.

  That sudden silence again.

  It was like she had momentarily blacked out, her senses re-emerging separately, with hearing the last to catch up. Emma unscrunched her eyes. Mrs Carter was striding out urgently over the lawn, her long thin arms waving above her head, her mouth making mute shapes, as if she was trying with great effort to speak but without her voicebox connected.

  Then the noises of the world swam gently back.

  ‘—on’t send, don’t send! You mustn’t! My grandfather!’ Mrs Carter was on the ramp of the lorry. She wobbled up past a slightly dazed Emma, who merely stared at her. ‘My painting, it—it must be in there! You mustn’t let it go!’

  She had her hand on the chamber door. Its lock uncoupled smoothly, easily. There was a brief suck of air as she pulled the big door open and it swung back on perfectly balanced hinges. But the chamber itself was empty. All was gone. Mrs Carter stood staring at this new nothingness.

  ‘It’s alright, Mrs C. There’s nothing to worry about. Look.’ Emma stood up beside her, showing her the screen of the controller. ‘The transfer was good. All’s fine the other end. There’s been no problem. Now they just need to unload, and then—that’s that.’

  ‘But how would they know? How could they possibly know anything?’ Mrs Carter didn’t look at the screen. She attempted to take a step forward, into the chamber, but drew her foot back sharply.

  ‘It’s very simple, actually, and not really about knowing. Not as such.’ Emma tried to show her the screen again. ‘You see, the receiving machine shows a full analysis too, as standard, and that gets sent back to my unit, automatically, and if it matches with our own report then we can be sure, we can be certain, that—’

  ‘Oh, forget your blasted machine, and all your blasted analyses, and data sets, and link-ups! You just don’t understand.’ Mrs Carter turned about and clumped back down the ramp. ‘You’ll never understand. That painting was unique. Unique!’

  Emma shrugged. ‘Everything’s unique, Mrs Carter. That’s the way of all things.’

  Mrs Carter ignored this, turning again on her heel and pointedly raising a finger. ‘How can you accept that a work of art, something made with care and understanding and human hands, something applied in minute increments, layer upon layer, something both made of paint yet beyond the paint it’s made of, something that abstracts the mere matter of its materials into something transcendent, beautiful, eternal—how can that being taken apart atom by atom and reassembled hundreds of miles away in an instant, how can that ever be the same as the original? It becomes no more than a fake, a mere copy, a false representation of that original.’

  ‘Not a copy. No. That’s not how it works.’ Emma frowned and squinted down at the bulky control unit still clutched in her hands. ‘The replication is perfect, you
see. You said it yourself. Atom by atom. It isn’t a copy at all. It’s the real thing. Just—transported.’

  ‘No.’ Mrs Carter shook her head sorrowfully. ‘No. It’ll be a replica now. Nothing more. It’s been devalued. Lost its true perfection. Its true perfection being that it was made imperfect, through uncertainty, through a mess of colour and visible brushstrokes into something that made sense of those—chaotic applications.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine with it once you see it.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t be him. It won’t be that same face looking out at me.’ She turned about, dejected. ‘I’ll know. I’ll feel it. And the less I can prove it, the worse it’ll be.’ She began to walk back towards the house. ‘He’ll be a fraud on my wall. Nothing more than that. An impostor.’

  Krištof and Stefan were already rolling the cable back on its reel towards the lorry. Emma watched them for a moment as they packed everything away, both men ignorant of what had just happened. Though, in truth, nothing had happened. Nothing out of the ordinary. After a while Emma took the paperwork into the house for Mrs Carter to sign.

  The old lady was shifting a few small boxes down from upstairs. There seemed to be quite a lot still left to remove. She signed the papers in silence.

  ‘Are you sure you can manage all this, Mrs Carter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We could easily do another quick batch.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘We wouldn’t charge extra.’

  ‘It’s quite alright.’

  ‘It’ll annoy the boys but they’ll do it. I only have to tell them.’

  ‘Please, just go now. You’ve already done enough.’

  Emma took a single step back. She paused, then left, listening to Mrs Carter’s mutterings fading away behind her.

  ‘—should’ve been done the old way. Nothing wrong with the old way. Good hard work. Simple. Done for hundreds of years. Thousands. Never a problem—’

  The lorry was all packed up and secured. Emma clambered into the cab. Krištof was looking out his window at the old woman: struggling as she carted boxes to the old estate car that poked its rear end from the garage.

  ‘It won’t get all in in one go.’ Krištof tipped his head to one side. ‘Three trips, I say she’ll need. It will take her a long long while.’

  Stefan leaned forward to look past his colleague. ‘She’ll do herself injury. Shouldn’t carry that way. Not good distribution of weight. Centre of balance is off. Is all wrong.’

  ‘Might get more damage in transit.’ Krištof started the lorry. It grumbled then lurched forward gently as they moved off from the kerb. ‘Then again—maybe not.’

  ‘She might be having accident during trip. Might break herself.’ Stefan sat back. ‘Or—perhaps not.’

  ‘Yes. Always possible something goes wrong.’

  ‘Yes. That is always the way of things.’

  3. First, Man

  A NEW day was dawning and Frank was the first man to feel it. The forest behind his house was slowly waking, with rising mist and soft thin light and the noise of little birds, and he was the first man to pass through it.

  The forest’s red floor was spongy from the long fall of pine needles, a slow accumulation through the years, but it was the steady soft pounding of Frank’s feet that the floor now supported. The tips of sunken stones and the ridges of slow-searching tree roots disrupted the clean line of the path, but Frank’s running shoes trod firmly upon them, finding their angles, their roughnesses, a momentary grip and release as he pushed on up the slope.

  Frank’s breathing was not laboured. There was no ache in his muscles, only the glow of warmth as they worked to his will. His footfalls beat the ground quietly, with unflagging regularity. He saw a young deer step out of the trees and onto the path ahead of him, its shape solidifying through the misty light as he closed in upon it. The deer was dreamy in its calm, in its lightly stepping unhurriedness. Its ears flicked. It heard the approach. It lifted and turned its narrow head, considering the keen determination of the runner’s movements.

  The deer bolted. A sudden springing away, soon settling to a more controlled gangle-legged trot up the path. But Frank kept on close behind it, watching how it picked out its steps upon the path no better than he did, watching fear and confusion ripple through its muscles as it zig-zagged indecisively from one edge of the path to the other, its head held high, its ears back, till it found a suitable gap in the dense pine trees and darted away between them and out of sight. And Frank passed the same gap without looking, without slowing, continuing on through the forest. He would permit no distractions.

  Scrambling up a steep bank Frank’s feet tore at a matting of moss, uprooting it from its weak hold upon the soil to roll away behind him, but he barely broke step to correct the slip. Mushrooms grew in wide fairy rings, only to be crushed as he ran on through them, their rubbery mulch imprinted with his sole. Nothing could stop him and nothing would. He was superior to all. He was perfection. He was indeed the culmination of all life. Even mountains were no obstacle for him. He vaulted up their sides. He stood upon their peaks. He gazed down into the depths of the valley, his hands on his hips. He breathed fully and surely. His eyes were bright. His skin was hot.

  He paused, and the world paused too. It awaited his next move. It waited for him to step back out from that high position, to begin the long downward run.

  ¶

  Kathy was up and dressed and sitting at the kitchen table when Frank arrived home. She heard his slow deep breathing as he leant against the jamb of the open back door, prising off his damp running shoes, hanging them on their allotted peg, straightening their long wet laces into neat even lines to point at the red tiles below.

  Kathy sat bowed over the table, her back to the door, one hand round a cup of coffee, the other flicking idly through one of her monthly magazines.

  ‘Is it ready?’ Frank could smell the cooked breakfast easily enough though there was no sign of it.

  Kathy nodded without looking round.

  ‘In the oven?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ Kathy turned another page without reading any of what was on it. ‘Just keeping warm. Foil on. It’ll be ready when you want it. How was your jog? See anything nice?’

  Frank didn’t answer but stood for a moment, tensing his jaw as he stared at the back of his wife’s head, its untidy knot of dark hair held up with a thin red rag. Then he turned and sprang lightly up the narrow steep staircase to the bathroom.

  As he stripped he looked at himself in the mirror, at the gradual revealing of his body with each item of clothing he peeled away. His torso was glossy and smooth and damp and beautiful. He felt no shame in finding his own body beautiful. He worked hard every day to keep it in peak condition. He delighted in seeing it at its best. And it always looked best at this moment, just after his morning run, the fine curves of his muscles pushing out against the tightness of his skin.

  Frank slipped his pants down to his ankles. Affixed to his right buttock was a small bandage pad: a thick white square of folded gauze held on with a cross of yellowing surgical tape. He tried to peel it back, teasing at one of the tape’s torn edges, but it was still stuck fast to his skin. He pushed a finger tentatively under the gauze. There was no pain, not any more. Not even tenderness. He stepped into the bath tub and drew the curtain halfway. Turning the taps to their precise positions he ducked straight under the cool spray from the showerhead with his eyes shut, breathing through clenched teeth as the temperature rose.

  Kathy came in.

  Frank heard her. He didn’t open his eyes but stood statuelike under the hot spray, letting the water run through his short-cropped hair and down his body. Kathy eyed him for a moment before easing up her skirt and seating herself on the toilet beside the bath.

  ‘I’ve told you before. I don’t want you peeing while I shower.’ Frank still hadn’t opened his eyes. He hadn’t moved. Hearing the creak of the lid being raised and the shuffle of his wife seating herself
was enough. ‘With all this steam. It’ll lift. It’ll mix in the air. It’s unhygienic.’

  ‘Then they shouldn’t have built the bowl next to the bath.’

  ‘The position dictates appropriate usage.’ Frank began soaping himself. ‘It’s not hard to wait. Or to pre-empt.’

  ‘If I need to go, I’ll go. And, until we get another fitted downstairs, I’ll go right here. You know we could afford an extension, easily. Convert that old tool shed you never use. Or would you prefer I wet myself.’

  ‘Don’t be so foul. You could always go outside. You know you could. No one’s there to see you. No one but magpies and foxes.’

  ‘Thanks. Now I can’t go.’ Kathy bowed forward, her brow almost touching her knees. ‘Not right away.’ She turned her head a touch to look at him. He was not a large man. ‘All that exercise and you never seem to grow any bigger.’

  ‘It’s not about size, it’s all a matter of—’

  ‘Fitness.’ Kathy squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. ‘Yes, I know.’

  Frank’s bandage pad was now thoroughly wet. He picked at it. He tugged gently at its soddenness, soaping the edges of the tape bit by bit, letting it pull at his skin as it came away: a fine glossy line of scar tissue slowly revealing itself beneath.

  ‘What did they take this time?’ Kathy, wincing one eye open, eyed the scar. ‘What little bit of you have they added to their collection?’

  ‘This time?’ Frank touched his fingers to the mark. There were others just like it at points around his body. On his abdomen, or high on his chest, or over the dimples of his spine. Each scar small and discreet. Hardly noticeable. Little keyholes into his interior, now sealed up. ‘No. They did this one a while back. Nothing more than a little flesh and fat.’