Free A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock Page A

holding hands and walking through the streets together…we’re drinking coffee at a pavement café.
    Leaving the commercial district, she walked along the glass-walled buildings of the sprawling university complex. The pavements widened and the dense canopies of whitebeam gave intermittent shade to the weekend pedestrians. Relegated, she thought, these whitebeam; just a form of sunblock now. But, once upon a time, they were the stuff of industry—the cogs, literally! As the sun flashed at her each time she strode out of the shade, it seemed the trees and sunlight conspired to send a message. For she made a firm decision to do more of this—take more walks through the city. Only, in future, she would walk without purpose, finding new places by chance. She passed two young women lying like bookends along a low wall, head to head; the space around them filled with chatter and shrill laughter. Luxury. Empty time.
    Out in the open, she crossed the no-man’s-land in front of the terminus. What were the chances, she wondered, of meeting someone from Mayhew McCline? And what would she tell them? Part of the truth: she’d been modeling the transport sector on and off for six months and not once had she traveled down a shuttle line. Anyway, if she had to, she could justify visiting Dave. Benjamin had given her clearance, of a kind.
    Dave watched from the platform and held his over-shirt in his hand. Seeing Jayna approach, he stepped onto the waiting shuttle. She followed. There were nine other passengers in the compartmentand Dave led her to a bench seat at the far end. The carriage was more utilitarian than she had expected: stripped down metal, no livery, wooden slatted seats, windows that opened manually, no air-conditioning.
    “So what was all
that
about?” said Dave.
    “I don’t want anyone to know I’m meeting you.”
    “Why should the shop assistant matter? What’s the problem?”
    “I don’t know for sure, Dave, but I don’t think it would go down too well at the office. And the shop assistant was a simulant so if anyone asked questions she’d have perfect recall.”
    “It’s your weekend. It’s nobody else’s business.”
    “They wouldn’t see it like that.”
    “They don’t fucking own you.”
    “No. Not quite. Well, yes, they do really.”
    The carriage juddered. They looked out as the shuttle gathered speed and within half a minute they were flying noiselessly away from the city center. The buildings blurred; she hunted for a recognizable feature. It made her eyes hurt. So she relaxed and tried to absorb the visual cacophony. And, this way, she sensed that the built forms were gradually changing in character from large bulks with shiny, reflective surfaces to smaller, less dazzling blocks with irregular rooflines; more complexity and more greenery. She grasped she was witnessing the compactness and semi-structured order of the suburbs. Despite the shuttle’s speed, it was apparent that security wires lined the tracks.
    At the precise moment this realization crystallized, the shuttle burst into a landscape so unrestricted that she gasped. An almost unreachable horizon, a high blue sky stretching across the entire landscape. She placed her hand flat against the window, for she wanted to stand out there, alone amid the giant discs of green and yellow that lay squat and unbounded on chocolate brown soils. She wanted to stand out there and feel the size of the planet through her feet. This was the first time she had appreciated—through the kindof revelation only granted, she now realized, to a witness—that the Earth really did curve, but so slightly. She felt less than tiny. She felt like a negative presence; a scratch of an entity on the skin of a planetary body.
    The circular fields’ bright colors grayed towards the horizon. These were the irrigated expanses of Outer Manchester, at one time a rain-fed region for cereals and livestock. Now, crops sprang to attention only at the command of