...The visor is tugging at the skin under my eyes. I’ve turned it off. But I can still feel the fizz. Like all my nerves have been turned into gum and stretched out. Across an entire Empire. Which they have.
iRemember.
There’s a painful lump, somewhere between throat and eyes. That’s the trouble. When you turn off iRemember, the real world comes flooding in.
I open an eye. I see the empty plastic semi-permeable membrane. My lids feel so heavy I can hardly move them.
I want to get up. I know I have a meeting with the Brethren in forty minutes.
Maybe today I’ll do it. Maybe today I’ll just down the bottle of Bureau Bourbon and the sleeping pills that don’t do any good as sleeping pills anyway. Then I won’t have to do it any more. And feel this tiredness. I don’t know who wants me to continue? There’s no energy left. I’m like a blown bulb. If only it didn’t need me any more. But it does. The City needs me.
I just don’t know if I can take the stretch any more.
And when I hook myself up to this chair I don’t have to be Frome any more.
I don’t have to feel the scratch of the grey wool. I don’t have to think about the next assassination attempt – which I do and do not want to foil. If I do, it’s not to be me. But to be Gordon Lim. Who has a mild heart attack after getting fired from managing the Tranquelle kiosk near Memorial Park into the ground. Or Pa Damian. Who loves the smell of earth and burned tyres in the Tranquelle Belt so much it makes him cry. Or maybe little Icara. Who remembers her first day at the kindergarten. When she hummed in class, and cried when they told her to stop, because she thought it was a sound only she could hear inside her head. She soon learned that even the inside of her head wasn’t a private space.
There are so many lives out there I want to remember.
Having to sit through another dinner at the Glitz, watching Big Brother’s powdered wig slide ever so gently down his bald head, and pretending I haven’t noticed, is not one I want to remember.
I pull off the visor and feel the cold of the basement air hit my sweating eyeballs. The curve of the catacombs. The lines come in and out of focus while my eyes readjust to reality. They have been born thirty times today. I have felt my Empire from birth canal to coroner’s table. I know it inside out.
It is divine to get lost in. I want to get lost in it until I can no longer find myself again. Or any of this. Get lost in each of their lives. But for now I’ll have to try and move this old bag of livers I call my body back to the office so Louis can put me in a pod and whisk me into the open arms of Big Brother, and his lascivious love for baked fowl...
***
They came. iRemember had heard the distress signal of the emergency alarms and responded. Loving mother Frome coming to the aid of her stranded child.
They came in in their khakis, with their berets at rakish angles on their shaven heads. Tall and nondescript.
They gave Icara a patch for the bruise on her forehead. Then they began to move the Arc-Hives out of the hangars. All the servers were carted off. They stripped down the entire compound in minutes. They shut everything down.
It was to be the end of Lot 458.
Icara did not like the helpless feeling that the clean-up men gave her. They ignored her suggestions and made her generally feel stupid and small, as if it was her fault that an Off-Gridder had knocked her unconscious.
They didn’t believe that she was on a special mission on behalf of Helena Frome and the Brethren. They had never heard of Project Eraser. They didn’t believe anything she said to them. Or at least Icara assumed they didn’t believe her, because they didn’t speak.
When she asked what would happen to Lucian Ffogg, she was told that the information was classified. But she could rest assured that both she and the CMO would be dealt with appropriately. He was, after all, a Government employee. iRemember took care of its own.
The plane that had come to take the Inspector back home to the City was so big that when it took off it would surely leave a dent in the runway. Icara stepped into the interior. The smell of sand was no longer around her.
She was going home.
She tried to put all the bad feelings and thoughts out of her head, and instead picture the City, a glorious, clean haven in a snow globe, as it would appear from the sky.
Even as she thought this, she realised that Lucian Ffogg was not going home. He was being taken out of it. She wondered what would happen to him. She wondered if decontamination was even really possible.
‘I didn’t like him,’ Icara said to herself in a whisper, ‘but nasty as he was, he probably liked being himself.’
The engine of the plane whirred into life with such force that Icara felt it was the world falling away and not an air-liner taking off.
He probably set the whole thing up himself and his plan backfired. You’re going home! Stop thinking about what’s happened for a second. Think about the House of Frome. Think about getting a new pair of shoes. Think about getting some sushi! Imagine that! Sushi!
The sky received them into its indifferent embrace. In a matter of hours, the urban dome would become visible. The oasis under its membrane, with Desert Ring 1 gnawing at its edge, like a virus.
A lizard watched the monstrous bird fly away from its shelter in a piece of plastic piping. By the time the sounds of the aeorplane were out of earshot, the desert had already taken hold of what was left of Lot 458.
Within a week dust would begin to corrode the empty hangars, leaving them looking like half-eaten carapaces. Off-Gridders would steal whatever useable scrap and tech was left to line their burrows with. The clean-up team hadn’t left much for them to find.
Rock, sand and prickly vegetation would soon cover up whatever vestige of evidence remained that hundreds of memories had once hummed here in hangars. Watched over by Lucian Ffogg.
***
The mechanical bird with its fire-breathing engines spat the man with too many memories out into the City. And the City ate him alive, like a dream-hungry Moloch. Thick rain, like glycerine, was slopping against the window of Gina’s Diner. Lucian was sitting, with his newly appointed ward, in a window-seat. Gina’s was an old-fashioned diner. Green upholstery and tiles. The green of bodily fluid. Lucian stared blankly at the table. Sedated to within an inch of his life. The ward ordered a cream cake with a knife jabbed into its centre.
Aidan wasn’t a bad guy. By profession perhaps, but not in character. He offered Lucian a piece of cake after he’d eaten most of it. The cake didn’t taste of very much. That was lucky. Because flavours made the man formerly known as Lucian Ffogg remember things. Which was painful.
The ward had told Lucian to take pills for a headache he did not remember complaining about. But there was nothing too strange about Lucian not recalling something. Not in his present state. Now he was drinking Tranquelle pills the size of plates, dissolved in murky City water. He didn’t seem to mind. Not the ache. Not the water. Not the pills. He couldn’t remember if he liked cake or not. And if he did mind, the voices of other people clamouring in his head soon drowned out the thought.
A doddery server came over, poured weak, over-warmed coffee.
‘Want to see ve specials?’ she rasped. The clingy pink top stuck to her like film. She was wearing heavy blue eye shadow. She had a tech implant in her left arm. She had had it done when she was much younger. Now she regretted it. The diner regulars didn’t seem to mind. Neither did Lucian.
She gave Lucian a pitying look and doddered away again.
Outside, a few sirens screamed. Bureau workers going about their business.
If Lucian had been listening to anything other than the noise in his own head, he would have heard traffic and shoppers. Buying Tranquelle and the latest fashion accessories in Squid-Skin™ from the House of Frome. He may even have heard someone being held up at gunpoint in an alley deep under his
feet in the Sub-Urbs. In the three decades that had passed since Lucian had been in the City, the place had aged. As badly as he had. This quarter was grey and limping. The Service Sector was grimy and full of the miserable, broken dreams of the people who lived in it. Even the good bits looked like a carpet the cat had been sick on. And if Lucian had been paying attention he would have said it smelt like it too.
But the Lucian who wasn’t Lucian was working on a tasteless cream cake.
Finally, Aidan got bored of waiting, pulled Lucian up roughly, and together they made their way out of the diner and into the evening damp.
Eventually a long black transit pod, with the look of an expensive shoe and not a vehicle, pulled up beside them. Lucian was bundled in. The black patent designer pump with a GPS and leather seats whirred away until it disappeared behind a tall, thin building made of mirrors.
***
The City was wet. As a swamp. A world of moisture and dampness.
Icara had happily made her way through it. Starting at the City’s main Superloop terminus. The pods of the Loop, in the pneumatic tube, looked like beads in a glass necklace. The Loop crisscrossed itself, like crazy straws. The Superloop allowed the City’s Bureaucrat class to travel pneumatically from home to office, in tight packets.
The Service Industry walked or hitch-hiked for transit pods. You could see some servers milling around, staring up at the Loop. They looked like they were frightened of all the brightness around them. Like they didn’t belong.
The Terminus was big and dirty. No matter how hard the Sanitation Committee tried to keep it clean. This was dirt the Government Inspector felt at home around. Empty packets of take-away food blew around in the corners of the enormous glowing dome. Icara watched them like old friends. The plastic bags and glittering foam wrappers were a familiar wildlife to the Government Inspector. She liked to read them. The logos reminded her where and when she was. They told her that she was no longer in the sand vortex of nothing. She was back among the signs. The signposts. No one could lose their way completely in the City. She looked up at the enormous, state-of-the-art digital board showing departure and arrival times for services that would cover the entire urban perimeter. Some of them even serviced the beginnings of Desert Ring 1. She basked in the luminescence of the Squid-Skin™ screens around her with the eye of a marine biologist. Only she was after the advertising. Perfumes and shoes and the latest haircuts. The whole City, she thought, was a glorious optical illusion. A mirage of lipsticks and cereal, suits, perfumes and umbrellas. So many umbrellas. And what a mirage. Out there in the reality of the desert was the anti-matter, full of combusting CMOs, Total Recall, and oblivion. Icara wanted the safety of this colourful cocoon. She was not ashamed to admit it.
But the City had, in the short interim of the Inspector’s stay in the desert, become a less safe place. In a place the Inspector couldn’t see, above the screens. A hairline fracture in the eco-dome. A thread. An alternate reality. Letting in a steady constant dribble of poisonous air. Imperceptible. The exterior insinuated itself into the City.
The lack of safety had nothing to do with the Off-Gridders. The frequent alerts about desert insurgents were old news. Frome had raised the threat level to Amber in her first month in office, and it had never fallen below a sort of pinkish red in Icara’s lifetime. She could not care less about insurgents. Especially having seen one of them up close, writhing between life and death, full of too many memories.
The lack of safety had everything to do with Helena Frome.
But Icara wasn’t thinking about Frome. For the first time in weeks.
A good fast-food snack. And her desk. A good iRemember connection. The inside of her office. Information. The water cooler. Order. Her novelty calendar.
She was home!
She loved the moisture. The whole terminal felt like an armpit. A shiny armpit, full of screens, reflecting some glittering, diamond-reality that lay just out of reach.
She wandered around for a while. Just to see the colours change.
Then she jumped on a Superloop pod and typed in the code for the Bureau.
Everything was going to go back to normal. And she was going to go back to work.
***
In the concrete cocoon of the Government building, on the top floor, Icara Swansong was sitting in an office. It was not her office. The homecoming was not going well.
Behind an enormous walnut bureau, floating on a sea of tomcat-scented carpet, Frome shifted in her seat.
Icara was vaguely aware of a frizz of red chignon, floating above the sombre suit. Elephant skin, thought Icara. It was the suit, more than anything else, that set the Head of the Bureau apart. Dense wool, much too warm even for the City’s cool climate, and a grey that Icara associated vaguely with her service weapon rather than fabric. Icara assumed she had been called in to talk about the encounter with the Off-Gridders. Frome must have received her report. Perhaps she wanted to congratulate Icara on taking on a complex and dangerous case like that of Lucian Ffogg. Or maybe try to dissuade her once again from Project Eraser and Little Brother’s evangelist talk of change. Frome didn’t like change.
‘What was it you wanted to discuss, grandmother?’
It felt strange using the word to describe Frome. She didn’t like using it inside the building. She thought the other Bureaucrats would think she had won her job through nepotism. Which was not the case at all. Frome wasn’t really what you would call grandmother material. She used the word now as a mere statement of biological fact. It did not carry the usual emotional marshmallow softness along with it.
Icara felt the room draw breath around her as Frome didn’t answer her question. The concrete physically heaved a sigh. She could swear she saw it. She felt exposed. And the place felt empty. Apart from the small side table with drinks on it, and a vase of plastic flowers. She hated the flowers. They were supposed to make the Bureau feel human. But they looked out of place, making every room feel like a hospital bathroom.
Frome hadn’t called her herself. The memo had come from Louis. Frome’s nasty little secretary. Her protégé. Icara resented him for being so close to the top, without any Academy training. Not to mention too much eyeliner and cheap shoes. She also resented him for being a scheming, vindictive little man. Especially because she knew this was just the kind of thing that her grandmother found most attractive in people.
‘You’re fired.’
Louis coughed from the ante-room.
‘I’m sorry, I think I misheard you, grandmother. What did you say?’
‘I said, you’re fired. Leave your ISpIs and office fob on Louis’ desk on your way out.’
Icara saw herself falling out of the plane as it returned to the City. They had never made it. She had woken up in Scientifically Proven Hell. She blinked. Not understanding.
‘You are making, Inspector Swansong, the face a rabbit makes on the butcher’s block. Now, I’m not sure what the butcher could say to make the rabbit understand.’
What could the butcher say? There was nothing in Icara’s head apart from the calendar she kept on her desk that she had bought on her first day at the Bureau. It was a joke calendar in the shape of a kitten. It sang the song from the Tranquelle commercial and every Friday the kitten’s tail would lift and vanilla scent would spray out into the office. Icara had bought it to remind her to stay upbeat despite the challenges ahead. It was not a helpful thought to have at this moment. In Frome’s office. Not when the world was ending. Not after what Frome had just said about the rabbit. Not with Louis cough-laughing in the ante-room.
‘Why?’ she managed, while the remembered vanilla smell made her feel sick.
‘You did not complete your investigation into Lot 458. You did not secure the perimeter after a serious incident at the compound. You damaged Government property,’ at this point Frome pointed at Icara’s ISpIs which she had repaired with a sti
cking plaster after the blow to her head, ‘and, best of all, Inspector, the CMO of Lot 458, as well as all the Government property, is missing.’
There must have been some misunderstanding.
‘But the clean-up team...’
‘The clean-up team? Inspector Swansong...I would take this opportunity to remind you that the Bureau’s emergency response unit should not be mistaken for any team of thugs in combat gear with an aeorplane. I would recommend that, after you deposit your effects on Louis’ desk you take yourself to the General Hospital so that they can check you for concussion and any associated damage...’
Icara bobbed up and down, unsure of whether to stay or go, protest or cry.
‘I...it’s not possible. They didn’t just have the boots, they had all the regulation equipment. Grandmother.’
A withering look from above the suit. Icara noticed that the smell of alcohol was overwhelming.
‘They had everything an emergency response unit should have,’ she continued. ‘No one could have guessed they weren’t Bureau personnel.’
Frome raised a hand to stop her.
‘I’m afraid I don’t share your feeling that there is anything else to discuss.’
Frome stood up as if she was being ejected by pneumatic pistons and made her way to the side table. The smell of more drink filled the room with its smoky tendrils.
‘There was something attached to a server that...should not have been there.’
‘All the more reason, Inspector, to fire you, for failing to secure evidence of a dangerous insurgent attack.’
Why didn’t she want to know? None of this made any sense.
‘You, you can’t do this. I’m the best Inspector the Rank 4s have got. There isn’t another Citizen in a green suit that cares as much about this place as I do. Grandmother!’
The tears were coming.
‘Please, grandmother...’
Icara hated herself for appealing to that marshmallow feeling of family, the feeling that didn’t exist. But there was too much at risk.
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