Claire North

My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before-a thousand times. It started when I was sixteen years old. A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger. No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am. That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous. The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the tale of a girl no one remembers, yet her story will stay with you forever.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Laura Dobie

“We really want Perfection to be good for people, to help them live better lives. With the right help, anyone can be perfect!”

"It isn't... perfect ... to have knowledge," she stammered, the joy stripped away. "Perfect people aren't knowledgeable they aren't... wise. That's what my brother says. Knowledge is for show-offs and people who don't get out of the house enough, we've got Google, Wikipedia. Knowledge is a place where sexy should be. Clever is sexy, the sociopath genius, the smartest man in the room, but that's clever that doesn't need to work, that’s not investing in knowledge, spending time at work, that's just … being brilliant. Being brilliant is sexy, not working hard, Sexy sells. That's what Rafe always says: sexy sells."

You didn't get to 1x10 to the power of 6 points in Perfection without some sort of surgery, I had concluded. Even the most beautiful, even the most astoundingly naturally beautiful, had something tweaked, tucked or smoothed. Perfection seemed to be an inhuman quality.

“You met me yesterday,” I explained as she rubbed her hands against the still-heavy morning cold. "It's all on tape." 

“My letter said you were unsure if you would stay or go.”

I shrugged. "Your assistants fell asleep. I thought about going, and decided to stay." 

“That's... good. That's very good. Did you tell me yesterday what kind of tea you drink?”

"Am I going to forget that by the time I get indoors?" 

"Yes - unless you're recording this, and remember to play it back." 

"You must get terrible service in restaurants." 

"I like buffets," I replied, detaching myself from my seat and heading for the door. "Also those sushi bars with the conveyer belts."

It was an incongruous place for Byron to have set up shop, but there, between a nursery school and a motorbike- repair shop, was an unmarked single-storey white building which had once been a dentist's clinic, and which was now the property of Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., Water Is Our Future, a shell company whose shell was so fragile a sea anemone could have brushed it away. 

"I used to love creating comparnies," mused Byron as we tramped up the path to the locked and bolted front door. "My proudest achievement was a pumpkin-pie company in Israel. Did so well I often thought I’d retire and do it for real."

"Perfection is an elitist tool of social division," she explained with the absolute confidence of a second-year humanities student destined to rule the universe. "

I have perpetrated a device that obliterates the minds of all who use it, making them little more than internet memes, walking marketing boards, human placards selling us the sex, the clothes, the cars and the holidays that the markets demand. The 106 Club is a hangout for clones -physically and mentally - the surgeon's scalpel, my treatments. I have no doubt that they are happy. Self-doubt, insecurity, needines, emotional fragility - these are not traits of perfect people. Have you spoken to anyone in the 106? They can respond to any situation with a two-dollar retort from a self-help book at a pinch.

The sea below exhaled like a troll, rattling stones as the water was sucked back into the deep, breaking breath where it burst against the cliffs. I could see the beauty in it now, the dark-on-dark-on-dark without end. Far away, a tanker crawled between the island and the mainland, heading north, towards Kirkwall and Lerwick, the Arctic Circle and the oil wells, belching fire across the sea.

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