Recite it. She said. In front of the whole class. I can feel pink and horrible embarrassment from my toes to my split ends – rushing. Jet-propelled embarrassment. I can’t recite it. She’s a horrible woman. And look at all those empty, faceless ovals of faces. Laughing at me. Even though they can’t recite it either. That’s how I feel today. In this interview. I’ve just lied about that. And he knows. And now he’s going to make me talk myself through my lie...all the way to the other side. Which doesn’t exist. No. This is more embarrassing than that day in class. I have never felt so mortified. Prickling. Yes. I’m about to cry.
Sunset.
Sunset.
Sunset.
What a wonderful sunset.
Sunset.
I have never seen such a wonderful sunset. Amplified by the dome. Norry said it looks different in the Belt.
Sunset.
Sunset. Those folks in the City don’t know what they’re missing. More money than sense. More money than me.
Sunset.
Sunset.
Sunset.
Sunset.
Stunning sunset.
Sunset.
Wonderful sunset.
Sunset.
I have never seen a sunset like this.
What’s that enormous flaming thing!
Sunset...
A thousand voices whispered. Other people’s memories. Thick and fast. Enough to fill at least 300 pages of densely typed script, about as long as the original code for iRemember itself...
***
They overcame the memories that made Lucian Ffogg Lucian Ffogg. He forgot the smell of the University campus. He forgot his mother’s special way of making him his reconstituted protein mash dinners. He forgot the red plastic flowers, and Emily. He forgot the night with all the vomit. And, as Gurk Caplan had always wanted, he finally forgot Gurk.
He forgot how he had ended up in this hole forsaken by Scientifically Proven God, writhing under the heel of a Government Inspector.
He might never again remember how it had all ended for him. Literally and metaphorically. He certainly couldn’t recall it now. The summer of ’88. One week after Emily left, when he was barely back on solids, he had been kicked off his university programme. There had been a letter. And a team of officious administrators. They had had reports that he had been falsifying the findings of his experiments. They had proof.
Lucian had felt the spotless lab floor fall away from him. It became soft. Like jelly. He had landed inside someone else’s nightmare. They showed him pages and pages of clearly falsified data, and meticulous plans to falsify data, all saved and stored, under his own iRemember username and password. Emails he had sent to himself. Damning evidence that Lethene had never existed. That his research was unethical and, worse, just plain fabrication. They had signed statements from his lab assistants. Even before he had forgotten all of this, Lucian had not known how they had managed to get those. His departure was so swift he had not managed to confront the lab assistants. When he met them, on the polished marble of the Great Hall, as he was leaving the Vice Chancellor’s office where he had pleaded ignorance and his innocence unsuccessfully to the secretary for the third time that day, they ignored him. As if he was vapour. Or worse, a dream. A Lethene dream.
Losing Emily had been painful. But it paled in comparison to losing his research, a way of life and his future.
He was forced to move back in with his mother. He wallowed in a mire of self-pity. And even Mrs Ffogg tired of listening to stories of espionage and surveillance. iRemember was not evil and it had not turned on him. But she forgave him, because we all make mistakes.
Lucian forgot the smell of old furniture and lilac hair dye and how they must have done something to turn his head. His mother, who had never been very good at hiding her disappointment, tried hard to do so then. He forgot the fleeting, sad look that he noticed when he caught her staring at him over the microwave dinners. He forgot how he had spent thirty days and thirty nights sitting in his underpants on the sofa.
He forgot how he had sat, with the smell of old furniture and damp carpet seeping into his pores and slowly driving him mad. Two weeks into the ordeal he deleted everything. Drag and drop. He burned the old clothes. Everything he had kept that reminded him of Emily, of his dreams. Of Lethene. The following morning a dark ring on the grass was all that was left of Lucian’s brilliant career.
He forgot the dry, unhelpful voice of Waldon. The Chancellor’s secretary and, it seemed to Lucian, a deliberately evasive and unhelpful weasel.
He forgot how he had made his decision one morning, when he had woken up on the same sofa, in the same underpants, with a bit of microwaved reconstituted protein drying into his chest hair. How he had decided to let life wash over him. His life: a bucket full of brown water, with no Emily and no career, and nothing much left in it at all.
His mother’s boss knew someone who knew someone. Who knew Gurk. And so Lucian boarded a small military plane, his beard flapping in the air-conditioning, a tattered crepe of potential unfulfilled.
All of this was wiped.
Lucian Ffogg, as he had been, no longer existed.
Perhaps Scientifically Proven God had worked his scientifically proven magic. Maybe the quaking form of Lucian Ffogg on the cold concrete of Lot 458 was a miracle. Soon, he would arise, cleansed, baptised in oblivion. Not a trace of self would be left. Perhaps. But Scientifically Proven God hadn’t left behind any blueprints. So it was too early to say.
***
The martyr to iRemember smelled of singed hair. His eyes were wide open. His lips were moving. It could have been rigor mortis. Or it might have been the engrams, striving to exist again, as memories are wont to do.
This is not what Project Eraser was meant to be.
She had not signed up to watch ageing so-called insurgents being eaten alive by parasitic engrams.
Icara tried to calm down. She tried breathing techniques, but there was, as it turned out, too much oxygen in the desert. Her training had been thorough, but it had not prepared her for this. She tried to pretend that she was Helena Frome, solid and not panicking. Lucian Ffogg was no victim. He was an enemy of the State. Maybe iRemember, like dogs, could sense the bad in a person. As she approached the prone body of the erstwhile CMO and bent down to see if he was indeed as dead as he looked, she noticed that her hands were shaking. She was breathing heavily too.
She reached for the Tranquelle vape. It was running out of charge and running out of the pink stuff. But there might be just enough for a quick pick-me-up. She took two or three steady inhales.
The pupils dilated.
And the next time she looked around it didn’t all seem so terrible.
She could still see the unsightly bunching of the skin, the expanded blood vessels and the bloodshot eyes. But Tranquelle took the edge off, like cutting the crust off toast.
Lucian’s last words wouldn’t leave, however. Maybe there wasn’t enough Tranquelle, or there had been too much adrenalin. Somehow the vape was spinning its own little web of paranoia that gripped Inspector Swansong. Gently at first.
Doubt.
She had been sent by the Brethren and the Bureau to explore Lot 458 and apprehend a dangerous insurgent. But the insurgent had turned out to be a bored, lonely old man. And then someone had gone ahead and blown the place up. To smithereens. And taken the old man’s brains with it. Maybe it had been the lonely, bored old man himself. Out of boredom. And maybe the forgetfulness of old age. But even the Tranquelle wasn’t having any of it.
She was sure that an explosion like this would have sent alarm bells ringing all the way to Memorial Park. In situations like this a clean-up team would be sent.
She didn’t have much time left to do the job she had been sent out here to complete before the clean-up team came. The Citizens would kick up an almighty fuss if
they heard about what had just happened to Lucian Ffogg. There would be calls for iRemember to be shut down, until the City found a safer alternative. Icara knew that Frome and the Brethren would never allow a complete reset of iRemember. She had never had to meet the Emergency Response Team before. Others she had worked with had. There was a response time of twenty-four hours. Icara preferred to underestimate and figured that she probably had about twelve hours before they came in with their big boots and small minds and ruined everything.
She made her decision.
Her hands had stopped shaking.
Her job was, after all, to sniff out corruption in the Bureau. That’s what the Committee had employed her to do. And she would do her job. Because she cared about her job. Probably more than anything else in the world.
If Lucian Ffogg was wrong and the Committee was right, so be it. If...she didn’t want to think about the other possibility.
No one could blame her for just doing her job. Which of course was the opposite of the truth, but Icara had just been through a traumatic event and had a head full of Tranquelle vape, and a strong dose of a lack of cynicism.
But before she could continue just doing her job, she would have to make sure that Lucian was at least relatively comfortable. She didn’t have the tools or the expertise to take care of him. The only place that had a decontamination machine powerful enough to fix what had happened to the CMO of Lot 458 was the Bureau Decontamination Compound. If that failed then there was always the City General Hospital. Both of these were miles away. All she could do was keep his fever down, and prevent infection.
She made her way out of the hangar. When she returned, with her first-aid kit, she found Lucian looking relatively peaceful on the concrete. The writhing had subsided. Only a disturbing black stain on his right hand and the scorch-marks up to his elbow suggested that something sinister had taken place. The swelling around the left arm had gone down. Around his left temple a blood vessel had enlarged and formed a bruise. An obscene doodle made by the hand of Scientifically Proven God.
Icara searched for a blood vessel underneath the beard. She felt a weak pulse. It fluttered. His breathing was shallow but regular.
As she rolled him into the recovery position, copying the Health and Safety chapter of the Code she had pulled up on her ISpIs, the hangar echoed with the eerie scraping sound of regulation overalls catching on gritty concrete.
Just a bag of bones. One minute angry insurgent. Next minute helpless sack, a parcel stamped with the quality-assurance logo of Helena Frome.
***
Icara collected evidence as efficiently as she could. She emptied Lucian’s pockets, and found nothing but dirt and fluff. She scanned the prone body with her ISpIs. She noted the date and time. She scanned the soles of his shoes, and conducted a chemical analysis of the rubber. More dust and dirt. She scanned Hanger 3, walking down the aisles in between melted servers. She scanned the outbuildings. She traced and retraced her steps, recording the spaces of Lot 458.
And then she found something remarkable in Hangar 1.
A single, blinking green light. A server that was still docked. She quickly plugged in her pad and downloaded the contents. It took three minutes.
‘What happened to you? Why didn’t you go up in flames too?’
She stroked the plastic side of the server. When she checked the download, the engram files were corrupted. A nightmarish melted mess. Ruined by the heat of the fire. It was difficult not to think of the Arc-Hives as people. Just very drowsy people, without voice boxes. They had all the same thoughts running around in their Bioware. More thoughts than most people, come to think of it.
And then she saw it.
An incendiary device. Or in the case of the device in question a non-incendiary device. A device that did nothing. Not a device at all. It did have a small red light on it, and an antenna. The small red light blinked, like a very evil and very stupid eye.
Icara carefully scanned the device with her ISpIs. It was faulty. There was a wire connection inside the casing that had failed. And it wasn’t a make that iRemember recognised.
iRemember was failing to recognise a lot of what had happened at Lot 458. Inside job, that’s what the CMO had said.
‘I don’t like things iRemember cannot understand,’ said Icara, perhaps to herself, or perhaps to the server. The server wasn’t listening.
At least the system was now responding. Since the fire, she seemed to be able to get through to iRemember much more readily.
Icara prised the device off the grey plastic.
This would not be landing in the hands of the men with the big boots. She would be taking it herself.
Apart from the unexploded explosive, she could see no evidence of Off-Gridder activity. She knew that they tunnelled between memory plants, sabotaging iRemember. They had turned Desert Ring 2 into a rind of cheese with their burrowing.
Maybe it had been Lucian Ffogg himself after all? Getting rid of the evidence.
Icara had not enjoyed her day inspecting the Lot before Lucian Ffogg was incapacitated. Now that she felt she was alone, she was much more able to enjoy her job. She began to hum and sing to herself. Jingles from Tranquelle commercials. Something itched. It was deep in her brain. Curiosity. The will to know. The need to investigate. It was what she loved most about working for the Bureau. The information. Sifting through it. Making sense of the nonsensical. Sometimes just knowing gave her a thrill. Knowing for the sake of knowing.
‘Let, the, Lady, be calm...’ she hummed.
She had almost forgotten that there was a half-dead CMO in Hangar 3. And then she thought she heard him whistle.
She ran out of Hangar 1, to tell him not to move his head. Out in the open, she heard more whistles, coming from different corners of the Lot. Not avian whistles. The sounds of lips on teeth.
OK. So maybe there are signs of Off-Gridder activity.
The Inspector followed the sounds, while sticking closely to the walls of outbuildings. They led her to a small rocky outcrop. There were definitely human voices behind the geological barrier.
‘Give it here, Nige!’
Even the hothouse plant from the City knew that rocks didn’t chatter like that.
Icara was careful not to stand out in the open between the hangars for too long. She crawled towards where the barbed wire and fencing of Lot 458 stopped, and hiding behind the rock formation she could see that the Lot didn’t, in fact, stop there. The earth fell away into a natural crater. In the bottom of the crater was a group of people in grey overalls with bad haircuts and a few Tranquelle plants, one of which had been hacked half to death. The group appeared to be digging something up.
Mr Ffogg, what have you been cooking, down here in your desert bowl?
She watched the nondescript people in dirty overalls clambering over reclaimed plastic barrels. Icara heard a whistle very close to her left earlobe. The last image her ISpIs registered was a grubby, smiling mouth, and a fist.
As she slipped into unconsciousness, the Inspector saw, between heavy lids, the group rolling three barrels out of the ground and away, into the open desert.
***
The Off-Gridders didn’t want Icara Swansong. They also didn’t want Lucian Ffogg. All they wanted was Lethene, and they didn’t need Lucian now that they had found and stolen his Lethene supply. They didn’t care what happened next.
If he had known erstwhile allies had left him to die, he might have been angry. But Lucian didn’t know anything any more. Topologically speaking, he was still in the desert. But existentially, he was in all kinds of different places at once. Inside his head the purple tendrils of Bioware were building bridges between his synapses, taking over his neural pathways, like parasitic creepers. A chunk of iRemember was grafting itself onto Lucian’s brain.
The result was a disjointed parlour game of space-time. And memory...
>
...A pale yellow keyboard. With the L and F keys in sharp and particular focus. A sickly, green feeling somewhere between my toes and oesophagus.
Tobacco, clustering. Thin rolling paper like the pages of a bible. I feel even worse thinking that.
A vibrating needle. It’s going to write. Skin stories. My skin stories.
The music of steel drums. And hotdogs. That warm, sweet chestnut smell that hotdogs have. Mustard ruins everything as it burns my sinuses.
You are wonderful. Especially the perfect round tips at the bottom of each toe. Perfect. Like little foot jewels. Or buttons to press, like an old-fashioned cash register. That’s what you are. Full of pennies and foot jewels. And everything wonderful and perfect.
There. Behind the bushes in Memorial Park. That’s where I hid my doll. And odds and ends from the tea set we were playing with. I especially remember the lid of the teapot. Because after that I forgot where I’d put all these things and the teapot remained without a lid forever. Well, I remembered exactly the place. Only not where it was.
...Sunset.
...Sunset.
...Pale yellow keyboard. And in front of me the screen flickers. I’m about to write the letter. The screen strobes. It’s making me feel sick. Saliva gathering behind my molars.
This is it. How it ends? Boiling anger. I feel my tongue molten in my head. How is it possible that someone could do this? Take your stupid, threadbare sweater, and your stupid gloves, and take all the special bracelets you made me, and all the Tranquelle serials you recommended, and get the Scientifically Proven Hell out of my room! Get out... It’s no good you leaving and leaving your scent behind. Thank Scientifically Proven God crying makes me unable to breathe.
...It’s raining so heavily I think it will wash us all off the lawn. On this day of all days! I thought Frome could control the weather!
And then, the erstwhile CMO recalled something he really had no business recalling…
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