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Little Brother - Final Part
by Chris Hanson

If you've seen The Truman Show, you'll recognise some of the ideas on which Chris Hanson draws in this clever parody, which she originally contributed to the Fantasy Archers topic of The Archers . But even if you haven't seen the film, there's much to enjoy in this dark tale of fantasy and reality.

Read the story from the beginning

Chris awoke to the light of a grey, misty dawn. He tested each limb in turn and, remarkably, nothing seemed to be broken, although his clothes were torn and bloodstained, and he had cuts and grazes all over his body. One of his teeth seemed loose as well. After he had picked himself up, he looked at the bike. He could see that it was far too damaged to use anymore.

Having no other choice, Chris began to limp determinedly along the road. He kept on doggedly, only stopping to drink when he found a stream. No traffic came past, and Chris wondered idly why, but mainly he just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

After he had been walking for two hours, Chris began to feel light-headed. This was the most exercise he had ever done in his life, and he had not eaten since the previous evening. Now he retreated inside his own head, walking onwards like an automaton.

It was in this semi-conscious state that he climbed a gentle slope towards the top of a hill, and walked straight into a wall.

Chris was shocked into wakefulness, and decided he must be hallucinating. There was no wall before him. So he took a step forward, and felt the same pain and resistance as before. He held out his hand uncertainly in front of him. His eyes saw misty horizon, his hand felt a wall.

Enlightenment dawned, slowly. This was the boundary of the world - his world. From here it was impossible to reach Birmingham, perhaps even to reach Felpersham.

Chris looked upwards. They were watching him, he knew.
A gentle, commanding voice suddenly spoke, "Christophe."
He blinked, looked around, but saw nothing. "Where are you? Who are you?"
"I am Kay. I created you."
Chris noticed he did not answer the first question. "Are you God?" he asked, uncertainly.
A laugh. "No. I am not God. Though perhaps for you, I am God. You can ask me anything you like, Christophe."

Where to start? What does one ask God?
"Is this the edge of the world? Can I get through the wall?"
"You can, if you want to Christophe, or you can stay. It's safe here, Chris. You are not familiar with the world beyond. Here you can lead the life you're used to, where you are happy. If you leave, everything will change. You may regret your lost life."

Chris listened to the weasel words, and suddenly became angry. "What right do you have to control me like this? It's not fair!"
"The world outside is not fair either, Chris. You can choose. The life you know, where everything is predictable, or the other world, where everything is dangerous and new. You have free will."
"How do I get out of here?"
"Look again at the wall, Chris. You will see the way out."
Chris looked at the artificial wall, and saw a set of steps leading upwards. He took a deep breath, and climbed up them. At the top, he was confused.
"Look harder, Chris." That voice again, like a caress.

He saw a door in the wall. He looked for the handle. He put out his hand.

***

All over the world, The Brother Christophe Show's viewers were unable to tear themselves from their screens. They put up with the misty picture so that they could follow the end of the story of the boy they had watched from the day they had seen him born. They had felt his mother's anguish when she discovered her baby had a cleft lip, and shared her joy when the operation had successfully repaired it. They had watched him grow from babyhood to awkward adolescence. Last night, many thought they had seen him breathe his last.

As they watched Christophe finally achieve his goal, they let out a collective cheer. Colleagues hugged each other in offices, strangers threw their arms around each other in cybercafés, families kissed each other at home.

***

Kay swivelled the captain's chair, and watched as Chris walked through the door into the control room. He rose to greet him:
"Welcome to Birmingham, Christophe."

***

Dickon watched as the company website once more ground to a halt under the pressure of people watching the final episode of The Brother Christophe Show, not to mention the equally large number of people trying to post their joy on the show's message board.

He had a feeling it was going to take longer this time to resume normal service. Once he had achieved that, he wondered how long he could get away with delaying public access to the show's FeeReView facility.

***

A year had passed since Chris had stumbled, blinking, into the control room at Pebble Mill. He was still seen daily by a worldwide audience. FeeReView had been a great moneyspinner.

Chat shows had lined up to interview Chris, and other shows were still falling over themselves to invite him to appear. He had been able to pick and choose which invitations to accept. Kay had found him a very good agent, who had jealously guarded access to the new superstar as if she were a tiger defending her young. Angela arranged for Chris to have a complete makeover (televised, naturally). Under expert tuition, a quietly confident teenager emerged from the once sullen monosyllabic adolescent.

His performance on various radio, TV and webcast shows had resulted in sacks full of fan mail and clogged email inboxes, mainly from teenage girls (and from many even younger). Chris was rich, as he found that income had been accumulating for him all the time he had been in Ambridge.

Immediately following Chris's escape, there had been a lot of talk from child development specialists about how the shock of discovering that his world was unreal must have damaged him irreparably. The media were full of self-proclaimed experts putting in their two penn'orth on this topic: the trauma of discovering that his Ambridge mother was not his birth mother (Chris's birth had indeed been filmed, but the audience understood that Susan was really an actress); the loss of his sister Emma, who was no relation at all; the confusion of learning that Brian Aldridge was not married to Jennifer but to Shula Hebden Lloyd.

As a result of this vein of opinion, one day a well-known lawyer came to see Chris. Angela had tried to head him off, but he refused to be turned away, deftly countering each of her arguments with eloquent insolence. He asked the young man if he had considered suing either the company responsible for The Brother Christophe Show, or Kay himself, as the man who had both created and overseen it. "You stand to make a fortune out of them, Chris. We can prove gross child abuse and mental cruelty. Tearing you away from your real mother, fooling you into thinking that your screen family were your real family, the list is endless."

Chris replied coldly that he had suffered no problems, and he had no wish to sue Kay, whom he regarded as a surrogate father (Chris's actual words were rather less erudite and more Anglo-Saxon, surprising the lawyer, who had only ever seen Chris as Angela wished him to be seen). He then invited the lawyer to leave in terms that brooked no argument, and the man left much chastened.
However, he was not the only person to have thought that Chris had a very good case for suing Kay and his employer. There was much media speculation. It was only natural for Chris to hate Kay, it was said. Others wondered at his seeming normality.

Why was he unaffected?

***

Kay was at home in his study. It was a year to the day since the final episode of The Brother Christophe Show. He picked up the BAFTA he had won for the series, and stroked it thoughtfully. Behind it on the shelf was a small container. Kay set down the BAFTA , picked up the container, and placed it reverently on his desk. He sat at the desk, and, contemplating the container, Kay relived the day of Chris's escape.

Chris was lying on the road in the dark while fog swirled around him.
Using his most authoritative manner, Kay dismissed all the other staff in the control room. He told them to take the rest of the night off. He would watch Chris, and if he needed their help, he would call them. To his relief, they left without much argument - probably partly so they could discuss his sudden mad creation of the storm. When the last person had gone, Kay turned off the video cameras, and hooked up the equipment so that when Dickon restored the website, viewers would be able to see a continuous loop of Chris lying in the fog.

Checking on the real monitors that Chris still lay unmoving, Kay left the control room. After picking up one of the golf buggies the staff used to skirt the edges of the vast bubble housing the show's universe, he drove through a maze of corridors to the nearest door to where Chris lay. From here, he strode through into Borsetshire, and made his way over to the road. Kay did not know what to hope for - he did not want Chris to be awake enough to see him, but on the other handÂ…

Eventually, he saw the figure lying in exactly the same place as he had been on the monitor. Kay approached the young man, and bent down beside him. He put out tentative fingers, and felt for a pulse in the neck. I'm no doctor, thought Kay, I'm not even sure I'm feeling in the right place. He carefully picked up a large piece of glass broken from the bike's wing mirror, and put it in front of Chris's nose and mouth: nothing. Kay was almost certain that the boy was dead.

Now it was time for Plan B.

***

Kay could not resist looking in the container, at the grey ashes inside: all that remained in this world of the first Chris Carter. An entirely different young man had escaped from Borsetshire under the transfixed gaze of a large portion of humanity. Kay had saved his own reputation, and the only people who knew his guilty secret had nothing to gain by betraying him.

Sixteen years ago, when Kay had been looking for a woman about to give birth who was prepared to yield up her son to be raised under the eyes of the world, he had had one special requirement known only to himself: he had been searching for a woman about to bear identical twin boys. The first birth only had been filmed (and what an unexpected dramatic bonus the boy's cleft lip had been). The film crew were monolingual Brits; the mother, midwife and nursing staff were Spanish-speaking. Kay had therefore been able to hide the existence of the second baby from all his colleagues.

Kay replaced the container behind the BAFTA on his bookcase, stood up, straightened his shoulders, and went to rejoin normality with his wife and children.

***

The actress who had played Susan for fifteen years was being interviewed by Brenda Lane, an ambitious young journalist who worked for a national tabloid. Brenda was well known for her ability to sniff out a story. She had spent hours on FeeReView watching The Brother Christophe Show, and watching Chris Carter's appearance on various webcast shows. Now she turned to Susan, and smiled.

"Tell me," she said, "As his mother you'll know the answer to this question: is Chris right handed or left handed?"

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