iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  Before extricating herself from her ergonomic workstation she downloaded as much of her iRemember file as could fit on a tablet. By surfing the engram eddies she could probably have access to enough information to find Lucian. And Ronnie. It would be a challenge. Icara felt the familiar adrenaline rush. When she’d signed up to Project Eraser she didn’t know what she wanted. She realised, feeling a little ashamed, that it was this. The adrenaline. The challenge. To go to Sector Z. To see it for herself.

  She heard the voice of the one Sister at the Academy, the angry one that had made sure she ate all of her reconstituted Academy food before she could join the others in the Great Rustle.

  You’ll never make it out of there alive, Swansong!

  She shuddered at the memory of the Sister. But the memory of the Sister was right. It would be suicidal without a service weapon. She ransacked her entire flat looking for a stun gun, a sick-stick, anything. She found a little can of Liquid Scream. It wouldn’t do much, but the shock of the sound might give her the time to run away. She stuffed it into a small duffle bag along with the tablet. Then she trawled through her cupboards looking for an outfit that wasn’t covered in Government logos or that particular shade of Bureau green. She settled on a pair of black trousers and a sweatshirt with a hood she used to sleep in. Perfect. She put her training shoes in the microwave for half an hour. When they came out, they were singed and the black plastic House of Frome designer labels had peeled off.

  She crammed a few Government Issue energy bars into her trouser pocket. Somewhere inside her the voice of a frightened young woman nagged. Without her uniform and badge, it was harder to step into the persona of Inspector Swansong. The right hand of the Bureau. Brave, accomplished, ready for anything. Ready to wipe the Bureau clean. Feeling like a frightened child all the time was no way to go on living. Inspector Swansong was dead. She would have to fashion a new persona now. Her future and her past were both at stake. She would clear her name and get her job back. And if she came to a sticky end in the Sub-Urbs before she did it, then so be it.

  Icara actually thought the phrase ‘sticky end’. This alone would have made it clear to an outside observer that she had no business going into the Sub-Urbs. Ever. Because she had no idea whatsoever of the kind of things that went on in the Sub-Urbs. The Sub-Urbs didn’t kill you with glue. Unless you were sniffing it. They killed you with illegal weapons – some liquid, some solid and a few of them gaseous. It was said that the nicest way to die in the Sub-Urbs was to have an illegal construction collapse on you in the afternoon. But Scientifically Proven God was the only observer, and obviously had other plans for Inspector Swansong. Though, come to think of it, Scientifically Proven God had never been to the Sub-Urbs either.

  ***

  Gurk Caplan wasn’t dead.

  He just didn’t want to be remembered. Had never wanted it. He had especially not wanted it when he retired from the Bureau. Sometimes he thought about Lucian. Even when his beard had started to turn grey, Gurk had still felt like a father figure to him. Little Lu. But he only let himself think of Lucian when he had a particularly strong sip of home brew. Most of the time he didn’t think about him at all. He had pushed the Bureau and everything that came with it out of his mind the day Helena Frome handed him the red envelope and thanked him for his years of service.

  Now he was running a Belt street-food restaurant deep in the Sub-Urbs. He loved Belter food. He loved the Belt. He’d always wanted to buy a farm out there when he retired. But the Belt was shrinking every day. While the City seemed to be growing. And Gurk was nothing if not pragmatic.

  The Sub-Urbs were an ugly, rotten place. They smelled of bodily fluids and the lack of Frome dollars.

  Yet, three weeks after he’d nailed a big reclaimed aluminium sign to the front door of his little shack, Gurk realised he already loved the Sub-Urban grime more than he could ever have loved the Belt.

  He had varied customers. Who didn’t mind waiting while he pottered around, frying Tranquelle stalks and pigeon. Some of these customers would barely recognise Frome if you shoved a dollar in their face. With their rheumatoid arthritis and other, less pedestrian ailments they reminded Gurk that there would always be a world beyond iRemember. A world where the Temple was some place that occasionally showed up over your wireless, and the Bureau was the place that ignored you because you didn’t have pockets full enough for your memories to matter.

  He liked when the Off-Gridders tunnelled up occasionally. They cleaned him out. As if they hadn’t eaten for days. Caked in desert dust, run-off mud and the sticky fluid of tunnel blisters. The blisters they got from too much digging. They’d stopped coming recently. Frome had raised the threat level to Deep Claret and there were agents now digging their own tunnels. Gurk wondered how long the City could remain standing when it was resting on flakes of foundations, matchsticks of earth.

  He put another pigeon wing in the fryer and a pot of protein mash dumplings on the stove. And he stopped thinking as the smell of spices filled his greasy little kitchen.

  The bell on the door told him he had another customer.

  The customer pulled a rickety old bar stool over to the counter and sat down. When he looked up from his fryer, Gurk frowned. He hadn’t had a Bureau employee in the shop since he’d opened. A hood obscured the customer’s face. One of Frome’s goons? The stranger was carrying the Bureau umbrella. The Sub-Urbs didn’t tolerate City types too well. Gurk wondered how this one had made it to his restaurant alive.

  The stranger ordered two whole pigeons. In a voice that gave Gurk the creeps.

  He felt something shift inside his stomach. An unease.

  He went on serving the suspected Bureaucrat, because the stranger was just another customer. And that kind of simplicity was what he loved about the Sub-Urbs and his street-food shack.

  But for some reason only Scientifically Proven God knew, he thought of Lucian Ffogg without a drop of home brew in sight.

  When the pigeons were a pile of tiny bones, and the stranger was gone, Gurk felt his stomach unclench. He breathed a sigh of relief. Some bodies carry death around with them. Gurk had never seen so much of the invisible atmosphere around one person. Not since he had met Frome in person at the retirement ceremony.

  He locked up early for the day.

  When the door was bolted shut, he did something he hadn’t yet done in his two years in the Sub-Urbs. He pulled the hidden sawn-off shotgun from inside the extractor fan and placed it somewhere within reach. It was sticky with dust and grease. But it was loaded.

  Something didn’t feel right. And if things really decided they didn’t want to feel right, then next time he’d be ready.

  ‘Every crime must be justly sentenced. The Brethren are well-versed in the syntax of justice. Writing sentences on the paper of the Law is God’s work. And the Brethren do it well.’

  Brother Twern the Younger, Sermons

  The entrance to Sector Z was hidden in plain view, on the City’s far-west side, beyond Memorial Park, and the leisure cloisters and bathing houses of the Temple. Drawbridge Prospect. At the end of the Superloop line. An abandoned plot marked the site of a successful arson attack by the Off-Gridders on a mansion in the finest Mem-Deco style. It used to house Frome’s predecessor, Malcolm Drawbridge. His private Superloop station still functioned, but Bureaucrats avoided it. Its slightly singed appearance reminded them of the impermanence of civilisations, and the fragility of their dome world. Those kinds of thoughts could really spoil your commute. Besides, it wasn’t near any good restaurants.

  Deep in the building’s burned-out foundations was a lift shaft. The door was missing its gold and copper panels. Stolen by Off-Gridders. Someone had drawn obscene diagrams of Frome performing lewd acts on an iRemember server in a corner. Someone else had urinated on the drawing. The lift was a wreck from the bottom of the sea of history, a Mem-Deco submarine. The synthetic mother-of-pearl bu
ttons, what remained of some fussy wallpaper – the interior retained a tarnished grandeur. The metallic echo of flightless pigeons and mutated mice running through ageing vents could be heard through its greening copper grilles. Music from the Sub-Urbs, the City’s deep subconscious. A criminal underworld. No place for upstanding members of the Bureau.

  It was a good job she wasn’t any more, Icara reminded herself. But it still felt wrong going there. Even on a mission to find Lucian Ffogg. The sun was already setting as ex-Inspector Swansong set out. She couldn’t take the Superloop. She was no longer a Bureau employee. Instead she traced its route in its shadow at street level. The streets were eerily empty at dusk, apart from the odd Tranquelle vendor. The few Bureaucrats due to work the night shift were making their way through the streets with their eyes firmly on their Tranquelle packets, their wireless travel visors on. They barely noticed the other Bureaucrats in their hydrophobic suits and umbrellas, let alone Icara, all in black.

  As she walked, she felt the lack of her service weapon like a cavity. The blood orange of the street-light drones flashed – warning lights on the curved glass of the Loop. The Temple, that cathedral to the Analogue, loomed ahead of Icara. She could see the rest of the City through its glass walls, a little crooked, as in a haze. Brethren in their papery gowns wandered aimlessly through the building, seemingly floating over the City, up and down staircases of glass. The Mem-Convict screens in Memorial Park gave the Temple a strange green halo.

  Memorial Park was positioned directly between the Bureau Building and the Insurance District. All Government employees, from Investigation to Sanitation and everyone in between, would pass Memorial Park on their way to the Bureau. A thin trickle of Bureaucrats was flowing in that direction now, and Icara followed them at a distance. She needed to keep out of sight. The more Citizens noticed her the easier she’d be to find on iRemember.

  Some of the people looked vaguely familiar. One very tall one in particular. Maybe it was that one she had flirted with at the office Fromemass party. A national holiday, rivalled only by the Brethren’s Red Paper Day. A small sadness flowered in her chest. Normal parties. For normal Bureaucrats to let their normal hair down. Would she ever get the feeling of rightness back again?

  She pulled off into a side street, Pie Lane. The reason for the odd street name had been lost to History. Not one of the Arc-Hives had any light to shed on the subject. No one had eaten a pie since the Code for iRemember was just a twinkle in the programmer’s eye. No one could remember what a pie was. Brother Isammy conjectured in a monograph that it was a misspelling of 3.14. The street was fenced in by scruffy-looking office blocks. Insurance wasn’t the golden goose it had once been, since they’d been forced to make pay-outs for acts of Scientifically Proven God. The buildings’ dirty façades threw long shadows.

  The vaguely familiar agent broke away from the crowd and drifted towards the shadows. There, the green suit waited by a sign that strobed ‘Phat’s Insurance Phirm’, pretending to read an ad for cheap cover in the window. Inspector Swansong would have noticed that the agent was only pretending. But Inspector Swansong was no more, and Icara, distracted by the new strangeness of the City’s once familiar spaces, passed on ahead without a second glance. She missed the agent turn and and begin to tail her like an ominous green satellite. Without the beeps.

  At the end of Pie Lane, Icara and her bulky green shadow both took a sharp left and passed through the wrought-iron gates of Memorial Park. The square had been designed, cleverly, by Bureau planners, as a memory of a wilderness. Before the Deserts had begun to inch there had been regions of the state that were wild. The iRemember profiles of nonagenarian Belters were testament to this fact. The wilderness was a heavy-handed metaphor, meant by the architect to reflect the nature of the Bad Memories the place contained. Urban Planners and Agricultural Historians had given advice on how plant life could be sustained in the square, while the rest of the City was barren. Insects crawled on artificial flora, whose LED leaves changed with the seasons.

  Icara had spent a lot of happy afternoons in this park. Lunching. Working overtime. Laughing? With friends? Come to think of it, no. She had always been alone. There was nothing new to that. Her last friendship had been with Gretna at the Academy. She could only recall scraps of it. She didn’t make friends easily. It had been such a brief and happy time that she almost couldn’t tell if she had dreamed it, or if she had seen it in the iRemember profile of someone else. It didn’t matter either way. She had said goodbye to those memories after graduation. After the Academy, there was time for nothing but the Bureau. It was important work. Work for the good of iRemember. Worth a few small sacrifices. And when she was doing good work she never felt truly alone.

  The park she had sat in so many times before looked about as alien as Desert Ring 2 that night. The shock of the realisation was like an abrupt edit in a Tranquelle commerical. Jumpcut. If she really screwed her eyes shut tight, she could pretend that she was watching the sun set after a hard day at the office, her temples itching from too much over-time. But really, in the space of just a few hours she had joined the other stream. The stream of people like Ronnie Spoon. The ones who didn’t belong in the City. She sat down heavily on one of the concrete benches that encircled the screens. She watched the names scroll. The artificial dapple of the LED leaves formed a gently strobing bower above her. A roll-call of names. You couldn’t very well avoid them. They were at least fifty feet high. It was the equivalent of a digital rosary. Like counting sheep. Ella Tommo. Elias Tommin. Nils Vern. Tabitha Chi. Sidney Smith. They went on and on. Icara felt nothing. Desensitised to what the screens meant. Which was internment and ‘humane’ punishment by the Brethren, for each and every one of the individuals hidden behind the pixels. She had passed them every day. To her they were like the words of a familiar old song. In a different language. No meaning, only melody. Nothing but names. Soft names. Hard names. Names like aeroplanes – only as these rolled up the screen the whole airport knew they were all cancelled already.

  Icara remembered her initiation and her first visit, with the other rookies, to the Memorial Convictions (Mem-Convict) Division of the Bureau. Mem-Convict was Frome’s Justice at work, keeping the Citizens safe. The process worked like this: as memories wafted from assorted cranial cavities, they tumbled through processing plants, just like Lot 458, until some of them ended up in the big, glass fishbowl of the Temple. Here, a small, select office of Brethren with partial visors transcribed the memories as they viewed them. It was hoped that the half-visors and the absence of Tranquelle would lessen the horror of watching Bad Memories twenty-four hours a day. The truth was these Brethren didn’t last more than a couple of years before they had to be Forgotten themselves, replaced by new recruits. The transcriptions were hand-written on little pieces of paper called MEMORANDA. Which was not an acronym. Only for emphasis. Crime was a serious thing. They were then stored in the Brethren’s paper records. And Scientifically Proven God help the owners of these memories. For they would be apprehended by Mem-Convict, taken to the Cell of New Beginnings and their memories wiped clean, surgically. Amygdalas shelled like their nutty etymological counterparts. The sins of the Citizens washed away. Each paper-wrapped Brother a tiny personal saviour.

  This had all existed before Frome. But the screens had not. It was her particular understanding of the power of theatre that had produced them. Frome saw to it that the MEMORANDA were streamed live across a variety of media. Any member of the general public could watch the names of owners of newly identified Bad Memories march by in green pixels. An unbeautiful litany. A roll-call. And sometimes, the seated member of the general public would see their own name flash green. By which point it was already too late for them. Frome’s brainchild had resulted in crime rates that fell faster than artificial snow at Fromemass. The square of screens was, in the words chosen by Frome at its inauguration, a Memorial to Bad Memories, which were being stamped out by the Brethren’s ring-sea
l of swift justice.

  It was theatre that Icara thought of first when she saw it. For it could only be theatre. She blinked, as if the action would change the arrangement of pixels on the screen. It didn’t work.

  Citizen Icara Swansong.

  What was her crime? That was her second thought. She ran through the Code in her mind. Losing your job wasn’t a crime, even by the Code’s high standards. She must have done something. The screens always told the truth. She was on the cusp of a breaking wave of disbelief, drowning in it, when a shadow covered the screen, and thrust out its hand for her duffle bag.

  She stiffened, instinctively closed her grip around the bag, and rolled off the bench. She heard the ominous sound of a Bureau service weapon being expertly drawn from its holster. She didn’t wait to hear more. She ran. All the while part of her mind raced through the Code, seeking for a sin. What had she done? Nothing but sacrifice herself for the Bureau until it ungratefully chewed her up and spat her out. A single shot grazed her arm. Sonic bullets. You heard more than felt them. They were designed to stun not to kill. The Bureau that she had fought for accused her falsely of a crime and wanted her dead. The thought filled her with rage. She remembered what Lucian had said. It’s an inside job. Frome. Somehow she was behind all of this. Maybe it was this sudden realisation, or the memory of training days at the Academy, with the voice of the Brethren ringing in her ears along with the whoosh of blood. Run or fail. Only in this case it was run or die.

  She ducked behind a Superloop stand. The next pod was due.

  She wouldn’t be able to access the Loop pods. Her codes wouldn’t work. But maybe she could lose her pursuer in the crowd. If she was quick enough, she might even be able to sneak into a pod behind someone. Desperate, she decided it was worth a try. She climbed the moving stairs to the platform. There were plenty of people to hide behind. The stands were always busy. The loop ran twenty-four hours a day. Bureaucrats clustered and jostled for space.