Free Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall

dressed up as Unnems, going into the Unnem estates for a day, hungry for Unnem breakouts and Unnem women. See how the other half lives… tours of the Amazon jungle, complete with real carnivores…
    For some young Techs never returned, despite the tiny distress-bleepers they carried in their breast pocket that could summon a psychopter within minutes. Five or six a year never came back. Sometimes the Paramils returned their belongings in a neat parcel, sometimes not even that.
    Headtech didn’t like it, but Headtech allowed it. Worse things had happened when young Techs weren’t allowed out at all. Five or six dead a year was an acceptable price to pay. Tech-intake figures were adjusted accordingly.
    Most gave up the razzle by thirty. Got hooked on digit-bridge or computer-archaeology instead. Only a few ever married. If unmarried female Techs got pregnant, they were aborted. If they insisted on having the kid, both were sent to Unnem.
    I’d never been on the razzle, though I’d considered it. Idris had been a full-time job….
    A shutter crashed down in my mind. I wouldn’t think of Idris; Idris had failed, left me, gone. Well, that was Idris’s business; he could get on with it.
    “Where y’been?” I asked Sellers.
    He didn’t turn his head, but his neck went rigid. He’d heard about Idris… Then he said, “London… cooorr!” making himself turn and mimic satiated lust. Revolting. Sellers with his gold-rimmed spectacles, glinting gold whiskers, and pale green eyes. He wiped a speck of drool off the corner of his mouth. “You ought to try it… their women are desperate for it.” He made them sound like zoo animals. Who’d want to mate with zoo animals? I couldn’t stand him being near me.
    “You on the 21.00 shift?” Sellers lived in permanent terror of being late. He departed thirty minutes early, buttoning his white coat, except the top two buttons, a nervous look spreading across his face. Anxiety is the cure for lust. … I laughed in disgust—at Sellers and myself.
    But there were Sellers’s jeans. Much better made than Unnem jeans, but bleached and frayed to look like them. And there were his Unnem credits, enough for a week. And his unexpired razzle pass.
    And the London razzle wagon left the gate every evening at nine.
    It was a way out. I wouldn’t have to face the sneers and the plotting … or Laura … or Idris’s unmade bed. I, too, was on the 21.00 shift; they’d be paging me in a minute…
    Sellers’s stuff fitted me; just a bit tight across the chest. I wrote him a credit note to pay for everything, dropped it on his bed.
    On my way out, I checked my pigeonhole for letters, automatically. Four envelopes. I stuffed them in a pocket and headed for the gate.

Chapter 6
    I travelled alone; it was Sunday night and raining. The damp crept in, clouding the stainless-steel seat backs. The empty bus leaped on its springs at every bump in the road, jolting air from my lungs. Dreary.
    I opened my letters to pass the time. A pay statement; I was getting rich. Too busy looking after Idris to spend it.
    Don’t think about Idris.
    An advert for cut-price Japanese octaphonic sound. One way of wasting my money, as Idris would’ve said.
    Mess bill. They’d take it out of my salary whether I was there or not…
    The fourth envelope was also computer typed. But handwriting inside… Idris’s… the old fake… he’s not dead… fool… written before he died. Crafty old sod: put it in my pigeonhole, where no one would think of looking—yet.
    The handwriting was big and savage as ever. But splotched with pale, blue blobs… drunken tears.
    “I can’t destroy her—you can have her. What has she done wrong? Keep an eye on her AM input—they are trying to override her sensors and do for her. …” That much was the Idris I knew. The rest was mad, like graffiti on a lavatory wall, getting bigger and bigger. In several places his pen had gone right through the paper. Just the name Scott-Astbury