iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  Like dust motes floating in the great big iRemember ocean.

  The tall, muscular shape in the green suit was in close pursuit. Icara clung to the duffle bag harder, dodging and ducking. But the pursuer obviously really wanted either her or her duffle bag. She ran through the contents in her mind. Not much. An incendiary device. And a copy of her iRemember files. Whatever they wanted, they’d have to try harder. She would find the truth. Then let that kill her. And not some (she counted the hourglasses on the shoulders) Rank 2 she could run circles around in her sleep. She clung to the duffle. The fabric would leave its imprint on her palm. A prickly worm of fear wound tight around Icara’s stomach as the suit moved closer, pushing the other Bureaucrats out of the way. They moved aside too easily. Plugged in to their entertainment systems, they didn’t even look up.

  Now Icara could hear the whirring whum sound of the approaching pod. The speed was immense. The enormous green shape stretched out an arm.

  Before the arm hit her, Icara jumped.

  You want my memories you Rank 2 lake slime? You’ll have to catch me first.

  She threw herself into the curved bottom of the Superloop runway, and up onto the other platform.

  ‘Loop Soup’. That’s what they called the Citizens mown down by the Superloop pods. A small but significant number of casualties of progress. The City she had worked for and served had turned on her, like an angry Dobermann. With the head of Helena Frome. The safety barrier pulled off her shoe as she scrambled up onto the other side. Through the protective barrier she could see the distorted body of the pursuer, like a blob of Bioware in a memory stick. She saw the goon make for the exit. If he was fast enough, thought Icara, he’d take the stairs back down and cut her off as she emerged at the bottom. But there was nowhere else to go. Could she outrun him? Luckily, she would never have to find out. At that very moment, a mobile Tranquelle vendor appeared, like a vision of Saint Derek at Fromemass. He must have been sent by Scientifically Proven God. His transit pod-like stall covered in Tranquelle packets and Belter tat blocked the goon’s path to the stairwell. Icara’s silent satellite could only watch as Icara bounded down the stairs on the opposite side, two at a time and away.

  She didn’t blame the green-suited goon. All the goons in the world were just doing their job. She would have done the same. Anything for the Bureau. Hadn’t that been her motto since the Academy?

  Finding Lucian Ffogg was no longer the only reason to get to Sector Z and then Blue Haven as quickly as possible. As a Bad Memory it was the only way for Icara to stay alive. This kept her running, long after her muscles had gone numb and her breath felt like chilli sauce on Belter dumplings.

  The pixels on the screens behind her blinked impossibilities.

  Swansong. Icara.

  Bureau Agent 14138888888888.4 ##.

  Years of Service: 10.

  Place of Birth. Ithaca Heights. City. South.

  Memories on record: 5775557885730237293299823233.

  Memories damaged or missing: 0.

  Bad Memories: 1.

  Ffogg. Lucian. 13655656565##.

  Place of Birth. Ithaca Heights. City. South.

  Memories on record: 757.4.

  Memories damaged or missing: Unknown.

  Bad Memories: 1.

  The Memorial Convictions Division knew that it only took one Bad Memory to poison the other 5775557885730237293299823232. Like the pests that would occasionally attack Tranquelle crops, they had to be exterminated. Mem-Convict, the City’s conscience, continued its important work.

  ***

  It wasn’t just the screens in Memorial Park. Frome had given iRemember a new lease of life when she took over. Before Frome the place was a memory outside of the soft sugary embrace of iRemember. A Bureaucrat in Tranquelle cold turkey. Where there had previously been buildings, sand dunes and abandoned vehicles materialised. Empty spaces were encroaching, filling with desert dust. Under its energy-efficient geodesic dome, the City had sacrificed width for depth. It grew ever downwards. Becoming ever more vulnerable to undermining. Off-Gridder attacks. Malcolm Drawbridge had fought valiantly for a while against the underground Off-Gridder threat, but Malcolm Drawbridge had finally fully succumbed to paranoia and psychosis. That’s what Frome told his Cabinet anyway.

  How Helena Frome had been democratically elected Bureau Head could be freely accessed by anybody through iRemember’s official State Record. But the real story was off the record. Rumours circulated, as rumours always do, and some ill-advised video-artist had even written a short-series inspired by the rumours. It never made it through Fergus, iRemember’s Secretary for Media and Entertainment. Needless to say, the video-artist made a full recovery from his delusions, when he was Forgotten, watched over by Little Brother himself.

  The rumours were true.

  Helena Frome had started life in the Sub-Urbs. Her parentage and early life were therefore lost to iRemember. The Sub-Urbs of Drawbridge Era were a different and far darker place than they later became. More violent and lawless than any modern Citizen could possibly imagine. No place for children. Though many of them were born, and more died. It was the playground of the rich and sadistic. Its inhabitants would tear their eyes out to get away. It was better than what waited for most of them if they stayed.

  Hardly anyone ever did manage to escape.

  Drawbridge was Frome’s ticket out. She seduced him quickly and efficiently. The way you’d change a lightbulb. Drawbridge was powerful, but he was not complicated. His tastes were relatively pedestrian compared to most of the wealthy pleasureseekers who ended up in the Sub-Urban squalor. Once firmly installed in his household, she made herself indispensable, not just as a housewife but as a secretary and eventually a second-in-command.

  She never forgave him for needing him. She therefore made sure he needed her, even if this meant microdosing his food. Her work for a doctor’s dispensary in the Sub-Urbs prior to meeting Drawbridge had given her an intimate knowledge of poisons and how to procure them with the minimum of noise. No one suspected a mild-mannered housewife. They had never met a Sub-Urban one.

  She needn’t have bothered. He knew he needed her. You could say a lot of bad things about Drawbridge, but Malcolm always did what was good for the Bureau. And there was no one better for the Bureau than Frome. Wasn’t it Frome who had transformed surveillance methods after a chance discussion with the wife of one of Malcolm’s drinking partners? Who would have guessed that a basic sedative like Tranquelle could revolutionise iRemember forever? Turning cold, dead memory data into a living, breathing emotional beast? Moving the work of the Bureau forward by leaps and bounds! What a woman, thought Malcom as he chowed down on his slightly odd-tasting breaded chicken! She could run circles around all those University eggheads whose scholarships the Bureau was paying – for what? The kind of research Frome did at her local book club! And Frome was free! And did his laundry! Look at her under his expensive chandelier, knitting a jumper for the unborn bump, and simultaneously snipping and shaping the threads of the lives of his Citizens. His cookie-scented Clotho, Helena, God love her!

  His Citizens, he thought. He hadn’t realised that they were becoming hers. He thought she’d birth him a boy and the unbroken Drawbridge line could continue as it had for generations.

  Partly out of spite but largely because she’d always planned it this way, Frome gave birth to a daughter. Or rather she picked one out. Malcolm didn’t know it, but the pregnancy hadn’t been real. A flesh-coloured suit under floral gowns. It was easy. After their brief courtship in the Sub-Urbs she’d always insisted on maximum propriety and sleeping in separate beds.

  No one knew, but Frome adopted Emily ready-made. From a Sub-Urban mother who wanted her baby to see the sky instead of air-conditioning vents. Frome felt sorry for the woman. It was clear she found it difficult to let Emily go. As a mark of respect, she made sure her birth mother’s name remaine
d on all Emily’s official papers. Malcolm put the strange naming down to pregnancy brain. Frome thought of it as a new beginning. Emily would be a Swansong, not a Drawbridge or a Frome. Besides, she liked the name. It was a good name for a dynasty. Musical. Lilting.

  The bouncing baby girl emerged onto the scene shortly after Malcolm’s curtain call. He hated her. His opinion no longer mattered. Frome loved everything about her. Frome’s coup was complete.

  It was shortly after the troubles in the Sub-Urbs had started. Frome had taken over almost all of Malcolm’s public appearances and Bureau duties, at the request of the Bureau, who felt that Malcolm’s obvious shaking and memory loss were bad PR. Nothing less desirable than actual memory loss. In the head of an organisation that made memory its business.

  It was time to look to the future. And Emily was it. She looked good in public photos and on State visits to Memory Processing Plants. Cutting ribbons around newly inaugurated Arc-Hives and presenting retired Bureau employees with bouquets of paper flowers from the Temple. Good PR. Which the Bureau couldn’t get enough of, especially in these times when rumours of corruption were beginning to spread, and the Sub-Urbs were clamouring for autonomy.

  But then, as young girls always do, despite their mothers’ best efforts, Emily grew up. Resentful, power-hungry and contrarian. Deceitful. This in itself would not have been a problem for Frome. Had she harvested an entire acre of her clones, she could not have found a better carbon copy of herself.

  It was what came after.

  Emily was going to be Helena’s greatest success. Instead, something else happened. Helena Frome had tried to plan for every eventuality. With family, she realised, there were just too many unknowns. Every plan was thwarted by emotions and hormones. It seemed she went to sleep one evening in complete control and woke up the next with a full-blown power-struggle on her hands.

  Icara Swansong had been conceived when Emily’s career was flying high. All of Frome’s plans laid to waste. Emily had been disciplined by the Bureau for not being more careful while on Government business. She had been stationed in the secret location to shut down insurgency and to collect intel on a dangerous substance. She had not been stationed in the secret location to play whoopee with insurgents.

  Emily’s lust for power was omnivorous. It would have chewed on its own self if it knew it would make it feel powerful. Emily had taken one look at Frome’s face – the face of power – set in a ‘no’. Her lust for power bit down hard.

  As it happened, she did not take to motherhood well. She felt swollen. There was sweating and a gnashing of teeth. And plenty of maternity-leave bureaucracy. Frome made it doubly difficult for Emily – because she had gone against Frome’s wishes. Applications for leave had been requested, and refused. Perfectly reasonable requests that would have been granted to other employees without question were denied to Emily Swansong. Just because she was a Swansong. Part of Frome’s dynasty. A part of Frome. And she had denied Frome’s will.

  There was no reasoning with Frome. She belonged to the ‘because I say so’ school of power and persuasion. Emily belonged to the ‘just watch me’ school of decision-making. And when the doctors told her to push, Emily strained as if she was pushing against the might of the entire Bureaucracy. There had been blood and excrement. They had told her about the excrement, but nothing prepares you. There had also been screams. A room full of screams, demanding life. A room full of mouths, ruptures, and openings. Not to mention bewildered doctors and midwives. It was an angry scene, hot with chaos. Chaos that Emily could not have thought possible in a medical establishment, not even one with an accident and emergency unit that catered for the Service Industry. An obstinate life was brought obstinately into the world in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology unit of the City’s General Hospital. Frome had refused to arrange a private ward. Icara was born at the same time as thirteen others, separated from the birth canals of eleven other new mothers by the tissue of a blue surgical curtain.

  That point, the emergence of Icara Swansong, like a tiny wrinkled mole, burrowing accidentally into a world full of snakes, was the full stop on Emily’s relationship with Frome. Frome wanted nothing more to do with the daughter. She severed the line. With surgical precision. She would keep Icara, though. To teach Emily a lesson.

  She arranged for Emily to head a secret committee. A committee she knew was useless. Dealing with an issue she had made up on the spot. The development of false memory, for medical purposes: the rehabilitation of Temple prisoners with Bad Memories. An impossibility, obviously. A fever dream of someone who liked a good laugh. Everyone knew that iRemember recorded nothing but the truth. And that Bad Memories could never be rehabilitated. The position was intended as a distraction, to disarm Emily. If Frome couldn’t stop her from scheming, she could at least make sure the scheming was out in the open.

  Later, when Icara began to show signs of similar obstinacy, she placed her under the care of the Brethren in the Academy.

  Frome thought she had the dynasty threat solved. But family is not like other threats.

  For one thing, the whole episode made her more and more bitter.

  Malcolm’s cookie-scented Clotho hadn’t just wanted the power. Not at first. At first, she had wanted to rescue the Sub-Urbs. She, the Sub-Urbs personified, wanted to avenge every high rent, every skipped meal, every act of violence. But she tried to fight the City using the City’s own currency – power and control. She succeeded only in becoming a second Malcolm Drawbridge. Realising too late, when the transformation was complete, that unless we change our values, nothing changes. Only the keys to the castle change hands.

  Imperceptibly, time moved on and Frome found that she had lost her convictions somewhere along the way. She had lost the desire to change. She had spent too long looking into the aquarium of the City, watching its people swim listlessly by. Besides what was the use? Look at the Sub-Urbanites. Completely unaware that they even needed saving! And Emily, by Scientifically Proven God! She had bitten the hand that pulled her out of the well.

  Human nature, concluded Frome, was ultimately disgusting. There was nothing to be done. Cynicism, that laziest and easiest of convictions, spread through Frome like Tranquelle-seed butter on toast. She gradually lost interest in the things that had kept her happy before. Leadership no longer made her happy. Even the efficient running of the Bureau did not make her happy. Only iRemember gave her life some small wisp of meaning. The year after Icara was sent away to the Academy, the heavy memory-use started. Records of forgotten summers, lake houses, glorious sunsets. The past worked its dangerous magic. Frome became addicted to other people’s lives. It was a comfortable proxy. An ersatz existence that nearly tasted like the real thing. Interspersed with occasional lunches with the Brethren, and the odd budget meeting.

  As she delved ever deeper into her favourite vintages of memory surveillance, her grip on her empire loosened. She forgot all about the Sisyphean task she had set her exiled daughter in Desert Ring 2. Frome’s attempt to keep Emily from scheming in secret by scheming openly had worked for a while. But like all dangerous weapons, it was only a matter of time till Emily backfired. When she was given her own department, which became known as the Swansong Centre for Narrative Development, her lust for power was given the key to the larder.

  She would show Frome that memories could be moulded. That the human mind, and therefore iRemember, was not the perfect recording device everyone believed. She would make up better stories. She would show them. She would show them all.

  Seekers for power become impatient. They begin to yearn. Which is dangerous in any form it takes. The yearning Swansong had become insidious. Seeking for herself. Refusing to bend to the will of the Bureau organism. Not bad per se. But not good for the organism. The body politic had a tooth gone bad. Emily was an abscess, simmering in the jawbone of the State.

  Waiting to pop.

  ***

  ‘You were her
e for decontamination. You’ve been through a lot. Or, at least,’ and she laughed that beautiful, round Emily-laugh, ‘a lot has been through you.’

  Before she said that, he felt that someone kind and thoughtful had rewound the tape. He had been offered a second chance. He was in Fred’s bar. There were plastic orchids on the table. The flowers were purple and pink – they looked like so many black eyes. The remnants of a fight. And Emily had won. He saw her now, sitting across from him, her perfect chignon now grey. Had they really aged so much?

  ‘How have you been, Em?’

  His tongue felt as if it was being used for the first time. Heavy and dry. A foreign body.

  Emily, as if she knew, offered him a glass of water.

  ‘Better than you, Lu.’

  The old shortening of names that was a sign of their love, and its brevity. She was probably right. He had lived without her for thirty years, and living was a relative term, he thought. After all that time, he had nothing to show for it. Nothing but a worn-out old Government onesie and a few greasy grey hairs. He had been ready to offer her everything then, when things still seemed hopeful. When there was more to life than an empty Memory Processing Plant, the Desert and a few angry activists.

  She sat there in front of him, like Scientifically Proven God at the Final Judgement. He felt he would have to account for a life poorly lived...barely lived.

  He hadn’t spoken about his saboteur activities. He was in possession of his faculties enough to realise that Emily was wearing the regulation green of the Bureau. With the gold stripes of high rank on her lapel. Her own department.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  He was beginning to feel as if he already knew the story of how she had disappeared. And why she had suddenly reappeared. But he didn’t want to believe it. For just a few more minutes he wanted to live in the world where he had had something and lost it. Not in the world where what he thought he had lost had never existed.