iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  The wireless told her she had a message from her mother.

  This was odd. Icara hadn’t seen her mother since before the Academy. The Bureau was...had been...her whole family. Emily Swansong had been an excellent operative. Then she fell from grace. Now she was stationed somewhere in one of the ends of the State. No one knew for sure. She was somewhere where Helena Frome could keep an eye on her, and where she couldn’t do too much mischief. That’s all Icara knew about it. And that’s all she wanted to know. At one time she had imagined meeting her mother. How she would be proud that Icara had made it so far in the Bureau, and so fast. This thought made Icara want to cry. She shook it off. Bureau recruits didn’t have time or space for family. So wherever her mother was, and whatever she wanted, it didn’t matter. If the stories Frome had once told her were true then Emily had never brought good news. There had always been some ulterior motive. She wanted to use Icara to get closer to Frome. Or obtain information. Icara had had enough bad news from family for one day. She deleted the message. A long bleep. Then the light blinked out.

  Back to the jingles. Icara liked this one. It was about the Belt farmer whose wife had been unfaithful with a convict and who was weeping big, purple tears, watering the crops in his Tranquelle field.

  She had cried in the Superloop. She had cried in her office. Somehow, here in her apartment, the tears wouldn’t come. Her eyes felt numb.

  She didn’t want to be in this room. No, she didn’t want to be in the City tonight. She wanted to be somewhere far away.

  The blue packet.

  She pulled off her heels. The carpet felt soft and thick. Her feet nearly disappeared into it. She dragged herself to the kitchen and scrambled through the empty cupboards. There was nothing to eat of course, but she wasn’t looking for food. She was looking for a knockout. Something to help her unwind the coils of her brain. By the time they had returned to their normal shape, maybe the world would have changed. Maybe Frome would have realised what an asset she was. Maybe she would have a wireless call from Louis, with employee screams in the background, desperately requesting her services again. Armageddon. They couldn’t continue without her.

  In a deep, dark corner of one of the cupboards she found what she was looking for. She had vowed she wouldn’t use it again once she’d graduated from the Academy and embarked on an adult life that had to be clean, unimpeachable. The stuff Gretna had given to her. What had she called it then? The Blue Angel...the Blue Lagoon. Or was it Endless Blue? Something like that. Tomorrow she would think about what she was going to do next. Tonight she was hoping not to think at all.

  Icara emptied the little blue crystals into a tall glass of Government Issue mineral water. The fizzing, marbled surface became the surface of the indoor lake, a nature reserve in the centre of Frome’s City. It swallowed her up. It gave her the bends. The lake became the ocean – which hadn’t been around for a long time. Longer than any living Citizens could remember. She fell through the ocean too. And continued falling. Until she fell right out of the bottom, and into a sky so dark and blue it looked more like an endless pot of ink like those in one of the Brethren’s cells.

  She thought she would keep falling, through time and space; reversing iRemember, reversing her life and her birth. The Desert circles would fill up with seas again. And she would keep falling. The City would unbuild itself, brick by brick. The Bureau would slowly come apart at the seams, unsewn, unconnected, until the networks were nothing more than balls of metaphorical string.

  Icara had taken Lucian Ffogg’s treasonable blue crystals. The kind that had been doing the rounds on the streets of the Sub-Urbs since he was ejected from the University. The kind that had been synthesised in some underground bunker by an Off-Gridder.

  She knew she would never have the opportunity to feel this kind of forgetting again, this kind of analgesic, even as she felt it. The kind that pulled the plug on iRemember. But she didn’t worry about it. Firstly because she did not know it was Lethene. She thought it was just something that made you high. Secondly, because there could be nothing worse than losing the Bureau. The one thing most important to her. Thirdly, if she did worry about it, the little blue crystals made her so numb she forgot she had a mind to worry with, or a body to feel.

  ***

  Icara felt the back of her eyeballs itch. When she peeled herself off the kitchen floor the wireless was telling her it was already noon.

  It took her five seconds to remember her own name.

  The Lethene she didn’t know was Lethene had done its work. Its side effects were glistening on the kitchen floor next to her. She looked at the bile-coloured fluid she assumed must be vomit. And decided that she didn’t care about the Government Issue apartment enough to clean it up. The beige interiors had never felt like home anyway. The carpet had been too soft. The soft furnishings still had the protective coating on them. The kitchen had never been eaten in.

  Besides, there was no time for cleaning.

  There was a Bureau position to be regained.

  Somewhere in between falling out of the ocean and into the sky in the middle of her Lethene trip something in her brain had shifted.

  Why did Frome care so much about Lucian Ffogg, a third-rate employee in a fourth-rate Lot in the middle of Desert Ring 2, all of a sudden? She knew her grandmother. Something did not feel right.

  She walked to her study, which was the only place in the whole apartment that sometimes felt as if it belonged to her. Her Nook-i300 pink-velvet-upholstered iRemember chair. With the adjustable back. And the fully ergonomic circular workspace. Everything was suspended around you in a series of concentric circles so that you felt like you were sitting in thin air. The chair, the console, the visor, and a cat calendar identical to the one in her old office – everything would shift around Icara with every imperceptible movement. Like walking in space, but with dignity. Without losing control.

  She strapped herself in, booted up iRemember and put on the visor.

  She no longer had access to all the Bureau iRemember files. She had lost those privileges with the little red envelope. She had only the basic access that all Citizens had, even Belters. Something about knowing this made anger simmer in the pit of her stomach. Access just like everyone else. Access to her own iRemember files, and access to the open documents published by Frome’s Honesty Committee, including urban planning ordinances, public health announcements and maps, as well as all the trashy media that iRemember generated and mashed together, a pastiche collection of True Crime dramas, interspersed with commercials for Tranquelle. The True Crime dramas were perfect for busy Citizens with short attention spans. They were colourful, had just the right amount of product placement and always ended well. That is to say, with the agent apprehending whoever had had the Bad Memory. Sometimes the stories were a bit more complex and featured the return of the delinquent citizen from the Forgetting, to the warm arms of a teary-eyed spouse. The trashy shows were what had made Icara want to be a Bureau agent, when she had first watched them as a child. Now they were just getting in the way of valuable leads.

  She asked iRemember to locate her own files. Everything she had seen and done at the Bureau. It wouldn’t be all the Bureau files by any means. But she had worked hard. It might just be enough.

  She waited.

  Something was wrong.

  She could walk through her memories of landing at the Lot. Relive the trembling interior of the plane and the hum of the engine under her left buttock. Thereafter, there was nothing but static. Where memories were missing, iRemember glitched. The glitches were like what Icara had heard used to happen in old-style video games. The kind they had in the dark ages. Only iRemember was hooked right into your synapses, so a glitch felt like someone scratching nails down a blackboard, deep inside your brain. It looked like it too. It took all of her power to pull off the visor.

  Scientifically Proven God damn it!

 
There was nothing to access! Someone had gained access to her iRemember files and had scrapped a whole section of memory! The entire sojourn in the desert with Lucian. Only Mem-Convict had that kind of access. A chill ran down her spine. Why were the Brethren tampering with her files? Worse, the missing section of engrams would make investigating Lucian’s disappearance properly almost impossible. How could she investigate what had happened at the Lot when all she could rely on was historical data? She had handed in her I-Spis, so she didn’t even have static records. But she did have the report she had started to write up of her investigation. And the little souvenir she had taken from Hangar 3 in her duffle bag. She took it out now and turned it over and over in her hands. Someone dangerous enough to evade Frome and to blink out of iRemember, like static. She vaguely recalled Lucian’s laughable reference to Lethene. She shook off the thought. One day out of the Bureau and already she was succumbing to every possible conspiracy theory. No. Lethene was a fairy story. Whoever had taken Lucian was real. Human. And dangerous. If she ever did find Lucian, he might not be Mr Ffogg any more. Icara remembered the return journey from the Lot to the City herself, although it was one of the missing files. She remembered the airport they had come down in, north of the Lake. That meant that Lucian Ffogg was, very likely, somewhere in the City right now.

  His romance with the Off-Gridders had obviously gone sour. Maybe he thought he was in control of the situation, but he wasn’t. And now they wanted to hurt him so badly they had blown up an entire Memory Processing Plant. Or maybe they were working together. Planning something much worse than what had happened at Lot 458.

  She asked iRemember to locate Lucian Ffogg. She felt jittery. She hadn’t eaten since one of the men she thought had been Frome’s goon had given her a Government Issue energy bar. iRemember seemed to be taking longer than normal to locate anything. She knew it wouldn’t find Lucian. That was not what she wanted. She just wanted his network. When it couldn’t find something, iRemember would give you a list of related people or places. They all belonged to iRemember. It knew them all. It was like a great, big, digital umbilical cord, with thousands of smiling Belter and City children.

  In this case she got lucky. There wasn’t much of a network. A faceless avatar of an Emily Someone Lucian had fallen in love with at college. One mother. Deceased. And Gurk Caplan. Gurk had some connections in the Belt, but the traces were faint. Belters didn’t spend as long on iRemember as City people. It wasn’t their main social network. So Gurk obviously had a few living relatives in the Belt, but weak iRemember pathways meant that, in investigative terms, the scent was weak. The trail, dead. As dead as Gurk Caplan. The land register said he was very dead. At the Happy Memories Happy Community Care Home for the Happy Elderly. Wow. Icara shuddered internally. That was heavy-handed PR, even by City standards.

  So, Mr Caplan, let’s see where you died.

  But when she logged in to the home’s public files she saw there was an issue with Gurk’s death certificate. It had been signed, as was customary, by a medical professional. A Doctor Magrat Smog. A Belter name. Vaguely familiar. The mists of memory swirled.

  A rush of digital pheromones.

  Warm summer sunlight on one hundred newbie desks. Icara had been assigned a Bureau Buddy. Charlene Hannity. A Belter. Too capable to be teaching novices manual tasks. But a Belter. And Belters never made it past Rank 4, even in Frome’s more open-minded Bureau. After Drawbridge era, anything would have looked open-minded. Anyway, there was Charlene. Filing papers when she should have been working cases. Teaching Icara how the filing system worked. How to look for clues, searching the Arc-Hives for key meetings and connections, and clipping useful memories.

  There was a lot to learn. How to slow the feeling of temporal vertigo so you wouldn’t feel sick. How to rewind and play back. How not to get lost in the eddy of other people’s thoughts. How to watch from a distance, while staying in your own mind. Observing like a Bureaucrat, and not getting caught up in empathy. For first-time Bureau employees, the temptation was to get lost in the feeling of being someone else. And while that was exhilarating, it wouldn’t help you get the job done. Icara was doing well for a first-timer. Icara did everything well. As if she had been born to do it.

  She even ate what she called ‘time sandwiches’ for breakfast. Layers of memory. These were some of the hardest to navigate. It would be all too easy to get sucked in to memories within memories.

  ‘Those are engramatic eddies,’ said Charlene, holding Icara’s hand to ground her, remind her that there was a here and now. ‘If you fall too far in, we won’t be able to get you out for a week. And it will hurt.’

  Icara ignored her. She had been practising with the visor late at night. She already had bruises around her temples from the microscopic input needles. Bruises you’d normally only see on Rank 3 Bureaucrats. There was a trick to surfing these eddies. It was a trick only she knew, and later, when she had risen far up enough, she would teach it to her crews. That was where the really good connections were, if you knew how to do it. But it did hurt. The feeling of a tongue stuck out too far, only deep in the centre of her consciousness.

  She was surfing now. She pushed deeper into the memory of rookie training. There. In an old iRemember file of a Tranquelle vendor. Buried under layers and layers of thought. A sign in a Sub-Urban alley. Surrounded by feelings of guilt and shame. A brown, rough sign with the letters peeling. Dr Magrat… The second part of the word was obscured by an enormous concrete pillar. It was hard to see details buried this deep.

  Icara focussed on the pillar, and something next to it. A street sign. Something Haven. And a number.

  Four layers of memory was too much even for Icara. Especially in her newly vulnerable state. She felt herself hyperventilating. The panic took hold. She would have to ride it out, but it was an ugly wave.

  Finally, as the shivers released, the room around her came back. The feel of the ergonomic chair. She had just enough strength to unplug one corner of the visor. The rest would be plain sailing.

  She held onto the memory of that dirty sign and the feelings of shame around it. She made a note on her tablet. There was only one Haven in the Sub-Urbs. Blue Haven. The Night-box District. Full of tech-junkies and even an illegal gambling network, plus a few temples to some fertility goddesses that had certainly not been scientifically proven. All of this meant only one thing. Dr Magrat, Icara recalled, was a front. A shell. She began and ended with a single property purchase. From a shady-looking man in his mid-forties, Ronnie. Ronnie Spoon. Who was familiar to Icara. He had been the man she had questioned in her first Bureau case. Everyone knew he was an Off-Gridder. But he had slipped through everyone’s fingers. Including Icara’s. Because there was never any evidence of foul play. She had supposed then, and now she was pretty certain, that this was because he had bribed the Bureau bosses. Ronnie was loaded. But he always looked as if he couldn’t get the money together for a decent haircut. She still remembered his face from the interview room, which Ronnie had called the interrogation chamber. You never forget your first Off-Gridder. And all the time he’d stuck to his story. Which, as it turned out, must have been true all along: that he ran an only slightly crooked night-box business in Blue Haven. The Sub-Urbs. The grey economy. Where everything was legal. Which was the same as saying nothing was. Go ahead, she remembered him saying, sue me. They hadn’t. He’d been released the next day. And she’d never caught him again.

  All roads lead to Ronnie Spoon.

  If she’d been in the Bureau now, she would have checked the memory files of Blue Haven’s legally registered business owners and tenants. She would have perhaps been able to find a few memories of Ronnie. His last known whereabouts. He would have been in disguise, but she’d know him anywhere. She didn’t need iRemember to recall that face. That nondescript, surgically enhanced face.

  It was up on the pin-board she had projected on the wall in her study. A carbon copy of the b
oard she had in her office. Her old office. A map she had been working on since she first met Ronnie Spoon. It was a messy mind map. All those loose ends. The layers upon layers of corruption. Off-Gridder hierarchies. Reaching almost all the way to a great big question mark at the top. And a scribbled sketch of Ronnie’s face in the middle. Laughing at her.

  She didn’t have access to the Bureau files now. So she would have to pay Dr Magrat a visit in person.

  Whoever had Lucian would know she was snooping around. The only advantage she had was time. The fraction of a second’s lag while her memories were uploaded. There was only one way Icara knew of to avoid iRemember’s all-seeing eye and gain access to the Sub-Urbs. It was a favourite place for the Off-Gridders to make their way into the City and try their luck at senseless acts of arson and sabotage. Sector Z. It was an incredibly dangerous place. One that previous Bureau Heads had tried to tame and failed. Frome had been the first to partly succeed. She may not have made it liveable, but it was no longer a smouldering powder keg. From there Icara could make her way to Blue Haven on the railway, a primitive form of transport used at one time by the City’s ancient postal service. It was still the cheapest form of transport in the Sub-Urbs. Maybe the signature on the death certificate was just a coincidence. Maybe Gurk really was dead. A fair few years had passed since the document was signed, and the life-expectancy of a Bureaucrat in the Sub-Urbs, especially a middle ranking one like Gurk, was about ten minutes. But it was a place to start.

  Icara’s temples itched, like they always did when she had a hunch. She had just uncovered Ronnie Spoon’s connection to the Off-Gridders. Finally. And it had happened by accident. Frome would have to take her back after this. Lucian Ffogg’s network of insurgents blown wide open and Ronnie Spoon in custody. Icara saw the re-inauguration ceremony. Even if it was clutching at Tranquelle stalks, she was already feeling so much better, just by doing something that reminded her of her job.