The Living

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Book: The Living by Anna Starobinets Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anna Starobinets
hidden notes like this in all his previous reproductions. He first found a hidey-hole with a note in it when he was eight. He found it and started doing the same: continued his ‘project’…
    ‘Where do you get the idea that it was you who left the note? It would be too big a coincidence. That you were reproduced in the same region… And ended up in the same House of Correction…’
    ‘Nothing strange about it,’ Cracker snapped back. ‘At forty all correctees go to the Festival for Assisting Nature, right? To the Pause Zone, right? which gives a big chance of being reproduced there, at the festival, in the Reproduction Zone, right…?’
    He was talking so quickly that he was tripping over his words. I watched his eye twitch. And red patches appear on his chalky-white skin, down by his throat. Whenever Cracker was telling me something he would pick at his neck the whole time; it was like he was coaxing out the ends of the phrases that had got stuck in his throat.
    ‘…So people like us often stay in the same region. And end up in the same House of Correction… Of course, it suits
him
that way! That way it’s easier for
him
to control us…’
    ‘Who’s “him”?’
    ‘The Living.’ Cracker winked again. ‘Right, little fellow?’ He drummed the knuckles of his fingers lightly against the Son’s transparent chamber, then pushed his face againstthe glass. ‘…Right, little fellow? It suits you, doesn’t it, keeping us all in the same jar…?’
    The Butcher’s Son gazed spellbound at Cracker. For a second I even thought that he really had heard him… But no. As far as I could tell, it was Cracker’s nose, flattened against the glass that had caught his eye. A couple of times the Son poked his fingers against the glass, trying to touch this amazing ‘snout’, but then he got bored and started rocking from side to side…
    The Butcher’s Son didn’t hear us, but we heard him. Sometimes we saw his lips moving as if he were talking, but I don’t think it was coherent speech. He hadn’t had a single educational program installed and no one ever communicated with him in first layer. Perhaps he was just humming something or repeating fragments of phrases he had heard in second layer… All the correctees had restricted access to
socio
, but the Butcher’s Son’s was minimal: only second layer, only music and entertainment programs. I don’t know if they cut him off from
socio
during showings of The Eternal Murderer out of ethical or educational considerations… I suspect not. He didn’t understand what it was about anyway. He didn’t understand that it was a series about him.
    …I was not connected to
socio
and could not watch The Eternal Murderer, but Cracker always told me what happened. I liked following the story. But above all I liked the preamble, the short story which began every episode. Cracker said it was sort of flashes of scenes a second long, and a voiceover reading out a text. I asked Cracker to repeat that text again and again. I learned it off by heart:
    ‘This story takes place in the time of the Great Reduction, while epidemics were taking millions of lives every day. People did not know then that the birth of the Living was coming and mistakenly blamed their illnesses on their domestic animals. And at this time there lived a Butcher. When anepidemic began in his village, he took his axe and in one day he killed all the cows, goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, dogs and cats in the area. Then he threw his bloodied axe down onto the ground and, exhausted, went off to bed. While the Butcher slept, his son picked up the axe. At first he hacked his mother and father to death, then his sisters and brothers, and then set off to his neighbours. The Butcher’s Son spent all night killing people. He drenched the village in blood, left no one alive, and the next night he set off on a journey. The Butcher’s Son went through villages and cities: every night hundreds of people died under

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