Under My Skin. Zoe Markham

and by then, we were all in far too deep to ever get out. But you need to understand Chloe, it started out as a group of people trying to do a wholly good thing. They showed us video footage, wave after wave of soldiers being wiped out en masse – IEDs, poisonous gas, machine gun fire, a hundred different ways, all of them unforgettably horrific. Things that none of us could ever un-see. And then they asked us the question: what if, instead of sending fresh troops out to replace them, more lambs to the slaughter, we could just reanimate the fallen? What if. Whatever you want to think about the morals of doing something like that, of controlling a dead body, of all the things you’d have to put a person through… that’s someone who’s already dead, Chlo. That’s someone whose life is already lost, and has been lost trying to save the lives of others. If they could finish their original mission, no one else would need to be sent out after them. No one else would have to be killed. It was a beautiful concept. It was flawless.’

      I think I’d draw the line at beautiful, and I don’t think I’d go anywhere near flawless, but I can understand his thinking at least. And I think Mum could have done, as well, if he’d explained it like this.

       You’re just like him.

      ‘Then why didn’t you tell Mum? If you honestly believed it was a good thing… why did you never tell her about it? You lied to her for years Dad, decades even –’

      ‘I signed the official secrets act Chloe, that’s not something you can take lightly. It’s not a contract you can brush off, it’s a law in itself. And it’s a dangerous one. I’d have been insane to tell her. She knew who I worked for, and that I was involved with medical research. I never once lied to her.’

      I’m desperate to blurt out the parental staple that he was definitely being ‘economical with the truth’, but at the same time I don’t want him to stop talking. I want to get all of this out in the open at long last, and this could be my only chance. I bite my tongue, and wait for more.

      ‘My job was to focus on brainwaves for the first few years, she knew I was involved in neuroscience, and cardiac arrest interlinked with it all later on, she knew that too. She knew every area I was working within, even if she didn’t know the reasons why. And she never once had an issue with it until the day she found out that it was for the military. You know how your mum feels… felt… about war. If she could’ve just calmed down, thought clearly past it…’

      He trails off, sadly, but I don’t want him to stop.

      ‘How did she find out?’

      He drops his head into his hands on the table, and tries to wipe away a rogue tear without me seeing.

      ‘My laptop. I must have left it unlocked, I still don’t know how… it auto-locked… but she jumped on it to use the internet for something. Said she couldn’t be bothered turning hers on, and mine was just sitting there.’ He stops and takes a few breaths before carrying on. ‘One of my browser links went to a video of our latest field trial. Project Rise. She said she clicked it accidentally. I don’t understand any of it… it was like she went looking.’

      I catch his eye, wondering if he’s really suggesting that Mum hacked his work laptop somehow. Mum, whose only involvement with computers was solitaire and the odd email where it couldn’t be avoided. He looks away, and goes on.

      ‘Without any context Chloe it would’ve looked… vile, abhorrent, inexcusable, all the things she yelled at me that night. She wouldn’t let me explain.’

      He stops again.

      ‘Explain what?’

      He doesn’t answer me.

      ‘Dad, I’m listening. What wouldn’t she let you explain?’

      He covers his eyes with his hands before answering.

      ‘We had to test our work, under carefully controlled conditions. We couldn’t just follow some soldiers around and wait for them to get shot. There had to be a rigged simulation. There was no other way of doing it, no other way we could know. Five lives were lost that could potentially save five million. And we almost had it working – almost got it right on that first run. No one had ever done anything like it before, it was ground breaking, we didn’t have any test cases to look back over, no past trials to consult. There was no other way.’ He doesn’t even try to hide the tears now. ‘Three of them got back up, just like we hoped, but when we gave them the first basic command they wouldn’t… they couldn’t… there were some… issues… with control. It looked awful, really awful, but it actually saved us years of theoretical research – seeing it… being able to test it like that. We got some incredible data, took comprehensive notes. They didn’t die for nothing, Chloe. They gave us everything.’

      Wow. Well, there’s not much you can say to that really, is there.

      Mum watched Dad’s government cronies kill some soldiers, try to reanimate them, and fail.

      No wonder.

      No bloody wonder.

      I feel sick. Sick everywhere, not just in my stomach. My whole head is just full of… sickness. What he did. What I am because of what he did. All of it. In fact, I don’t just feel sick, I am sick. A sick perversion. A fallen, failed weapon. Created by evil, for evil. Because it’s never just about saving lives with the military, is it? It’s always as much about ending them as anything else. My head’s spinning. It’s too much, all of it, too much to take in. What did they tell their families? How the hell would they have got volunteers for something like that anyway? Oh, my god, were they volunteers? What if they didn’t…? I close my eyes and clamp my hands over my ears because if this is how the world is, how my world is, then I don’t want to see or hear any more. I’m rocking backwards and forwards in my seat slightly, and I feel like I’m caught up in a terrible storm: seasick and scared, only it’s not water that I’m riding on, it’s a sea of dead, decaying bodies and it’s all my fault.

      Dad reaches out to hold onto my shoulders, to keep me still, to keep me from losing it completely I think, but I duck under his grip and push away from him, taking my hands off my ears in the process and he’s quick to jump in.

      ‘It isn’t how it sounds, Chloe, it isn’t. You have to listen to me; this is the problem, this is what she wouldn’t let me explain!’ He sounds whiny now, as if it’s everyone’s fault but his. As if the universe has dumped a great big pile of ‘unfair’ right into his lap. He watched them shoot people, kill people, and what did he do? He sat and took notes.

      ‘If I hadn’t done the work, they would have just got someone else. I couldn’t have stopped it. I could never have stopped it,’ he pleads, and I don’t know if he’s trying to convince himself, or me.

       He took notes.

       Don’t think.

      There’s a long, painful silence. I feel detached from myself somehow – like this is all just a new nightmare, something that could never actually happen. Not to us. Not to me.

      ‘I risked everything to get away, Chloe. And if I hadn’t been involved, I’d never have been able to –’

      Oh, no. No. I can’t let him have that one. ‘If you hadn’t been involved, you’d never have had to.’

      I look him right in the eye as I say it, and watch the tears fall.

      ‘I didn’t pull the trigger, Chloe. I was just there to observe, so we could adjust the formula. So we could make it better. I didn’t kill anyone. I would never kill anyone.’