From the bestselling and award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K, a darkly inventive novella about the dangers of pursuing perfection.
Harmony is tired. Tired of working so hard, tired of the way she looks, tired of being average.
But all that changes when she decides to splash out and upgrade her nanos. And why not? Everyone's doing it now. With a simple in-app purchase, you can update the tech in your bloodstream to transform yourself - get enhanced brain power, the perfect body or a dazzling smile. Suddenly, everything starts going right for her. She's finally becoming the person she always wanted to be.
But as Harmony will find out, there's a limit to how many upgrades a body can take . . .
Previous books by Claire North:
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Touch
The Sudden Appearance of Hope
The End of the Day
84K
By the same author, writing as Kate Griffin:
A Madness of Angels
The Midnight Mayor
The Neon Court
The Minority Council
The Glass God
Stray Souls
Release date:
September 22, 2020
Publisher:
Orbit
Print pages:
100
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The pimple on her chin was the first sign that the debt was out of control.
“Pimple” was kind. “Pimple” was what the pharmacist called it when Harmony, in a hushed whisper and dark sunglasses, asked for some kind of cream, something that might erase all trace of it as magically as it had appeared.
It was, in fact, a spot. A single, bulging, red-rimmed spot, popping with yellow pus beneath a sliver of translucent skin, thin as cobweb. She googled “I have a spot” and read with growing horror of hormone imbalances, blocked pores, sebum and oil, and of a thousand solutions ranging from lasers to pastes of liquefied kale and garlic. Even in the height of panic, she knew that this was absurd, and cleared her browsing history in case someone found the search.
She made it forty minutes before her relentless fumbling caused it to burst. Once it had, she couldn’t stop poking at it, unable to look away from the shameful eruption. Soon it was bleeding, and she didn’t know if that was better or worse. She daubed the throbbing red mark with antiseptic, and phoned work to take the day off.
“I . . . my mum is . . . I’ve got to go and . . . It’s my mum, you see.”
“What’s the matter with your mum?”
“Nothing, nothing. I mean, not nothing. She’s had—The doctor called and said I had to go and see her.”
“If it’s nothing then why . . . ?”
“You know she had a stroke, I mean, a few months ago. It’s to do with that. They wouldn’t tell me much over the phone.”
“You’ve got the Moores at 3 p.m.”
“Right. Yes. Could James . . . ? I mean, I can send him the file – it’s . . . and the keys are . . . shit, the keys are . . . Look, maybe I can drop by on the way to uh . . . to my mum . . . ”
She felt a little bad using her mum as an excuse, but only for a moment. Parents understood these sorts of things; they knew what mattered and what didn’t. Karen Meads wouldn’t have minded Harmony using her name in vain, as long as it was for the right thing.
On the other end of the line, Graham was unconvinced. “We need you back first thing tomorrow, and you’re working a Saturday for me.”
“Yeah, OK . . . yeah.”
Harmony hung up and sat alone, staring into the small square mirror on the wall by the bed. Her well-proportioned, cosy one-bedroom apartment, as she would have described it to any sucker foolish enough to rent, was at the top of an extension on the back of a family house in Streatham, which had been converted some fifteen years ago into six convenient, well-appointed flats for the modern professional. The wallpaper was faded red; the carpet was string and blue fluff. It cost more per week than her old place in Reading had for a month, and she wasn’t sure if the black mould in the bathroom had been killed by the chlorine spray, or just bleached a faded grey.
She thought back to her conversation with Graham and wondered how she’d get keys to James without anyone at the office seeing her face. She felt like a foolish child, her lie ridiculous and easily exposed. Harmony Meads wasn’t usually stuck for words. It was as if this single offending rupture in her flesh had robbed her of her gifts of speech, an arrow to her Achilles heel. She knew she should get up, get moving, find some way of solving this, and for nearly seven minutes she leaned in close, prodding and squeezing at the rim of the offending mark, and was horrified when, having doused it in antiseptic and the pharmacist’s cream, her poking produced a tiny curl of white gunk from beneath her flesh. It looked like cream cheese, or old mayonnaise. The soft substance was less than two millimetres in length, but held close to her face she could have sworn it was gigantic, the first sign of something alien, unnatural, a dead maggot of fat growing beneath her skin.
She washed her hands three times and called her healthcare provider.
“Hi, you’re through to Fullife—”
“My name is Harmony Meads. I’m . . . ”
“ . . . Please press one for upgrades and in-app purchases, two for technical support, three for . . . ”
Harmony swore more violently and deeply than she had for a very long time, and held the phone to her ear as the cheerful, gently Scottish voice – Wasn’t Scottish the accent of honest reassurance? – exclaimed how important her call was to them, and in between synthetic, sunshine-syrup music, pitched the latest in cellulite reduction upgrades.
“Sometimes exercise isn’t enough, but don’t worry – there’s a solution to flabby thighs and floppy skin! Introducing Cellublast, the latest upgrade from Fullife Healthcare. Our nanos will have you looking strong and pert within two weeks from activation. Now with forty per cent off I Love My Knees when you buy two fat-blasting packages for a limited period only!”
When Harmony finally got through to someone, she wasn’t Scottish at all, but sounded Brum and unhappy with her life choices.
“You’re through to Emily. How can I help you?”
“Hi, my name is Harmony Meads. There’s something wrong with my nanos.”
“Harmony Meads, yeah. Can I get a postcode please and the first and third letters of your memorable word? Hi, yeah, I can see your account details here. What’s the problem?”
“There’s a fault with my nanos. I think that . . . ”
Now, for the first time, the magnitude of what she was saying hit her, and Harmony nearly slid into the toilet, where somehow she’d managed to plant herself at the exact moment that the call went through, caught between bedroom and bathroom mirrors.
At the centre of her soul, a darkness opened up, and the machines in the hospitals played their songs at her, and the fluorescent lights were pure whiteness overhead and in her dreams the nanos were singing, singing, singing, as they ate her alive from the inside out.
“I . . . I have a spot,” she blurted before the terror could take her. “I think that maybe . . . I tried running a diagnostic but my control panel wasn’t working: it keeps saying there’s a login error. There was an incident a few months ago, a malfunction with my nanos. I had to go to hospital; there were . . . there was an error in the programming, and now I have a spot. You need to fix this.”
“Please hold.”
She was held in silence – no music, no ads, just the absolute silence that surrounds a shrouded iceberg on a moonless night – for nearly six minutes, and thought she’d been cut off and should try calling back, when Emily returned to the line.
“Hi, yeah, I can see what the issue is. I’m going to transfer you over to debt management.”
“No, but I—”
The line went silent. This time there was something that had once been a tune, transformed into a synthetic nursery doodle of sound, and still no ads. That lasted three minutes before a much more upbeat, cheerful voice exclaimed, so much louder than Emily that Harmony nearly dropped the phone:
“Good morning, Ms Meads; my name is Gillian! How are you today?”
A flood of relief. Gillian was a kind, caring human, who’d make everything better. This was apparent from twelve words of Yorkshire chipper, two dozen syllables of compassionate interest in all the problems of Harmony’s life, which were, if she was honest with herself, legion. “I want to report a problem with my nanos.”
“Oh no, what kind of problem?”
“I’ve . . . I’ve got a spot.” Even in the relative privacy of her bathroom, a cupboard-sized cell with pipes that carried the arguments of Mr and Mrs Patel in No. 1 up and the weed-stenched cushion of Hailey and Phuong’s gaming marathons in No. 2 down, she whispered the words.
“Say again, Ms Meads?”
A little louder, her humiliation given voice. She shielded her phone from the vent above the sink through which all sound travelled, including Mr Patel’s morning shower rendition of “When I’m cleaning windows”, and hissed, “I’ve got a spot.”
“Ah yes, I can see how that might happen.”
“Are my nanos malfunctioning? Do I need to go to hospital? Is there a programming error? Are they . . . doing things? Can you diagnose that from where you are?”
“No, no, Ms Meads, no need to worry at all. I can see your account details and your nanos are running perfectly fine. What’s happening is that some of your boosts are being shut down, including Dermaglow, which might explain this incident. There’s an adjustment period.”
“What do you mean, shutting down?”
Now her voice was rising in anger, indignation. She’d imagined many causes for this calamity, ranging from a massive malfunction that was at this precise point liquefying her organs from the inside out, through to the first signs of an infection she didn’t have coverage against – leprosy perhaps, whatever that was. Gillian’s explanation had not featured in any of these fantasies.
“Looking at it . . . Ah yes, so there’s a few boosts that will be shutting down in the next twenty-four hours, including Dermaglow, Rise and Shine, Fresh and Perky, Powerful Poise . . . ”
“All right, I’m going to stop you there Gillian – Gillian, was it? Gillian, I’ve got to stop you. I haven’t authorised this. I haven’t . . . I have a contract and I’ve been letting a lot of services lapse I know – but shutting down is absolutely unacceptable; these upgrades are . . . ”
“Ms Meads, I’m very sorry, but you are several months behind in your payments to Fullife and until payment is received, we are obliged to shut down non-essential services.”
At the . . .
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