Emily cleared her throat a few times. Delicately. And then, because the anger would help the engram insemination process, she began to tell Lucian everything.
‘There’s no such thing as Lethene. Forget about it.’
Helena Frome, Speeches. Later Years
The campus was dead. Everyone had gone home for the holidays. The University was deserted. Floating in the bluish air of winter.
In a dark, cold lab that, despite the advanced stage reached by humanity, had still not been fitted with central heating, Lucian Ffogg sat breathing. He could see his breath. His hands, the tips of his fingers, turning a livid purple, quivering like Tranquelle stalks in the wind, above an experiment. Fittingly, it had been an experiment with Tranquelle stalks. Lucian couldn’t explain it to anyone. He didn’t want to explain it to anyone. It sort of made sense – if by sense one meant instead the-world-is-a-firework-set-off-in-the-back-garden-of-some-whacked-out-on-halucinogenic-reindeer-urine-raving-mad-deity.
He had tested it on the AI mice. He thought he’d fudged something. He had fudged something. He’d misread the scales. But he’d been able to replicate the same results. Over and over again. It was almost as if Lethene wanted to get made, Scientifically Proven God damn it.
Lucian had created a memory decay mechanism by synthesising Tranquelle and various elements he’d found lying around the lab. Without ever meaning to, he’d synthesised a chemical get-out-of-jail-free card. A collection of little blue crystals in a petri dish that were the antidote to Frome’s big game of urban monopoly. He called it Lethene, because he was going through an ‘obsessed with antiquity’ phase. It was to engram-encoding what salt is to slugs. It was Judith to the Holofernes of Government surveillance.
Since the moment of its inception in a lab, those around Lucian, and even sometimes Lucian himself, weren’t quite sure whether even Lucian knew what he was doing, or if indeed the world was being controlled off-screen by some big guy in a fancy hat, who knew which strings to pull. Lucian was not, even at the peak of his looks and health, what you would call commanding.
He worried daily that they would see through him. Enthusiasm for his theories and ideas was contagious. But he felt more and more that he would be found out. To make sure this didn’t happen, he spent endless hours in the lab with his chemicals. And in what he hoped no one realised was a last-ditch attempt to understand what he had made, he even decided to stay behind while the University floated, icily suspended in the giant daiquiri of holiday season. He had foregone the parties and the drunken fumbles and tumbles with his fellow students. The lab darkened around him, day after day, as he grew progressively angrier, trying and failing to comprehend it, to translate its nonsensical existence into numbers that he could understand, fathom, and possibly earn a university prize for. But the horrible truth was that, brilliant as he was, Lethene, this blue, squishy acme of his brilliance, had been reached by accident.
***
Now, it is a well-known fact that every ground-breaking action by an individual in a freezing science lab has an equal and opposite reaction in the warm, walnut-coated chambers of Government. However, the body of the State is slow and ponderous, difficult to move. So Lucian was allowed to play with his new toy for a whole week before something horribly inevitable happened.
It was Thursday. The night before the University was about to open its doors to five hundred over-sexed and over-achieving freshers. Lucian was in the library, feeling the watchful eye of the Brother on the back of his neck. The University library was usually a place of silent contemplation. It was a building made entirely of glass and looked like an extension of the Temple. Like an old-fashioned ticker-tape machine, full of scrolls and priceless paper artefacts. Which is exactly what it was. Students could come in and request a book from the collection. But they were not allowed to touch the books. They would be assigned a Reading Sibling, a Brother or Sister who would turn the pages, wearing special gloves and special library robes.
Lucian wasn’t really reading. He was writing up the findings of his endless lab work into something printable. He intended it to be so good, it would make its way straight to the paper journals, with the serial numbers, which is where you really wanted to be, and not lost in the crowd of poorly-edited open-source stuff available on iRemember.
Emily chose this moment to come into Lucian’s life. As he contemplated it now, he realised he should have recognised it for more than the coincidence he had believed it to be. In the ancient languages section, with a Sister turning the pages on a book about the ancient art of Italian cinema. Whatever that was.
The effect was immediate.
Just as Helena Frome had known it would be.
Lucian saw the plump lips and shapely breasts of the goddess in the library and he was under – and would not resurface for another thirty years. Until he was in the catacombs of the Swansong Centre for Narrative Development.
The Bureau’s darling – Agent Emily Swansong. Before she was cast away into the deserts for insubordination. Without her green suit, and reading about cinema – but secretly playing sudoku through her SPI-Pro 3200.
Every part of her had been carefully assembled, prepped by Frome herself. Not one part of her real. That is to say, she was a real person, acting a part. She had dyed her naturally dark hair blonde, and wore Government Issue prosthetic body armour – which was wash-proof and bulletproof, as well as attractively enhancing the asset’s assets. Strapped to her inner thigh, which Lucian couldn’t see, was her service weapon, a stun gun. Though there was a glazed look in his eyes that suggested that, at this point, even if he had seen it he would have ignored it.
She smiled at him.
He gave her a confused look back. But she kept smiling.
And that was it. She had infiltrated his life.
The next thing he knew there would be negligées. And there would be all those hours in the lab, flicking candy hearts at each other. Only he had not known then that every second he was under the watchful eye of Helena Frome, who hid behind the SpI-Pro screens, grinning.
He had not known he was dealing with a fabrication, a dream.
She had been no more than a memory, even when she had existed.
***
Decontamination hurt.
He recalled his past life now with a strange detachment. What did he feel, he asked himself? Understanding that he had lived a lie? What did he feel? There was that feeling in his stomach, as if someone was wringing out wet sheets. He felt that. And he felt something else, too. Vague disbelief. What if she wasn’t telling him the truth? She said that she had been nothing more than a fabrication. Well? Why should he believe her now, when she said this? How could he trust anything any more?
But he also somehow knew it was true.
If he was really honest with himself. He recalled those moments at which he had felt her feel nothing, nothing like the care and love he had felt for the character Helena Frome had created. There had been an air of boredom around her. Every day. And he had chosen to ignore it. He had chosen to ignore everything. All those questions in the lab. Profound questions about his work. Asking to see his notes. He had been flattered and grateful that someone cared. He had answered all of her questions. He had even transferred his suspicions to that other guy. The student whose name he could no longer recall. When she was doing the spying. His Emily. He had let her see everything. He had thought he was the first person to fall in love like that.
Now, someone had stopped the movie, woken him up from hypnosis, and shown him that he was making love to a plastic, blow-up doll on stage. In front of the world. The world was laughing at him.
The doll was laughing at him, with her pouting plastic mouth.
It was too much.
What had it all been for? The pining. The suffering. The hope. The hope that had not been real. While he languished in the desert. The belief that things could have been bet
ter. Could have been different. When they could not have been. He had been playing engrams of a fabrication, surrounded by silverfish. Cruel reality had thrust a pump of dry ice into his mouth. He felt the icy crystals, each one shredding the inside of every cell. Before long he was in little pieces on the black and white tiles of the Decontamination Chamber.
The headache he had treated with pills and a cream cake, while he was still cocooned in the warm shroud of Polymnesia, returned. Everything that comes back, Lucian was finding out, comes back worse.
‘Please...’ he managed. ‘Please don’t tell me any more.’
How did they sleep at night, thought Lucian, these people who fabricated themselves and insinuated themselves into the lives of others? Emily blinked at him. If he’d asked, she would have told him she slept well. Between expensive sheets. Her head full of images generated by the Dream Maker 3000 – Government Issue, very expensive, and frankly unnecessary.
Emily Swansong had always slept like the dead.
And woke up each day hungrier for power.
***
The Swansong Centre for Narrative Development was housed in the basement of an abandoned Memory Processing Plant in Desert Ring 2. Deeper in the dunes than Lot 458. The point Frome’s mathematicians had calculated was the furthest from the Chesterfield chair in the City. It was a living tomb. A catacomb of fictions, where Emily primed her special crack-squad of Liars, working on falsehoods for implantation. The crack-squad had proclaimed her a tyrant some years ago now. And left. There was not a living soul in the building. Only Emily.
She didn’t need anyone else, she affirmed. They hadn’t managed to implant a single false memory. They wouldn’t know a false memory if they were part of one!
She had finally done it. Alone. With no one to hear her manic laughter but the lizards and yucca. The thing Frome believed was impossible.
The Head of State’s lack of imagination was going to be the death of her.
Emily had worked on false memories with obsession. They had been her entire life. And she was her own best test-subject. She would hook herself up to the machines she had invented for the purpose. She would brave the electric shocks, the cold-water shocks, waking up with woolly mouth, waking up concussed, burned, and always with the false memory not having taken.
But she had carried on.
Nursing her feeling of unfulfilled destiny.
Finally, a year ago she had cracked it. And it had been so simple, that at first she couldn’t believe it. Then she had been angry. Then sad. Finally her plans had crystallised. Now, she had perfected her system. And if she wanted you to remember having lunch with the ghost of your recently deceased accountant, that was nothing for her. It was easy as 3.14. Easier.
It was in the basement of Emily’s abandoned Memory Processing Plant that Lucian Ffogg was having his narrative re-written. The erstwhile Government employee, a pawn of fate, then a pawn of Frome, had become a pawn in Emily’s plan to take over the City.
Some people are just unlucky.
Re-winding the grey, clammy coils of Lucian’s brain was easy. And the story Emily was sculpting was simple.
Lucian had come to the City. Tormented by unrequited love, in a wild attempt to get even with Frome and her progeny, he had planned an assassination attempt. The assassination attempt – she loved to say the word. It hissed its sibilants and sang a song of biblical evil – had succeeded. Lucian Ffogg had always been very clever, with a history of insurgent behaviour. A terrorist past. A hatred for Frome and everything she stood for. Thrown out of the University in disgrace in ’88. Disappointed dreams. Frustrated ambition.
All of this was true enough. Which is what made it stick.
Lying was easy when you told the truth first. And it was so much easier on Lucian. Years of Tranquelle abstinence made him putty in her hands after just one pill.
She held his head in her hands. And rewrote his story, whispering sweet nothings into his ear.
The fictions flowed.
Every so often, Lucian would find them too sickly. Emily would wipe the spew off her knees and carry on. Here, Lu, have another Tranquelle. That’ll make you feel better.
The process wasn’t pretty to watch. So it is just as well that no one was watching.
The Swansong Centre for Narrative Development was coated in Lethene shells. Lucian’s own forbidden product was making his demise possible.
What did the successful assassination attempt look like? The devil is in the details. This bit was the most important part. Rather like eggs when baking, too little and the cake would be dense and inedible; too much and the cake would become a blancmange, an omelette. All puff with no staying power and leaving a bad aftertaste.
She could not simply say the attempt went by in a blur. Well, she could. But the memory would not stick. Lucian would recall it as true for perhaps five minutes, but his brain would pretty soon cotton on to the fact that it was being duped. To avoid this, she had included lots of extra details, grapple hooks – footholds for fictions. First she set the scene, laid the table, and then brought on the main course.
Frome was eating a solitary meal in the State Dining Room of the Glitz. Frome ate alone. It was 3am. Frome rarely had time to eat at the usual hour. The room was dark – a sumptuous, jade-and-gold-carpeted meadow. There was a smell of whisky in the air. As there always was around Frome. The best-quality stuff, flown in specially from the far reaches of the State. There was a brewing facility, one of the Glitz greenhouses, not too far from where Lucian’s old Lot, Lot 458, stood. Was no longer standing. There was a vase of bright-red plastic flowers on the table. As there was on every table, across the State. Red plastic flowers, with a mesmerising quintet of waxy petals on each. They had fleshy green stems.
If you got the right details right, you could leave huge swathes of blank canvas and the host would never notice. The parasitic memory would remain, with its little clawed feet clinging to the sides of Lucian’s hippocampus.
‘Yes, I remember,’ said Lucian, ‘iRemember.’
And he did remember...
She’s sitting there. Her perm curling and crisping under the heat of the spotlighting. I feel soft carpet, sticking almost imperceptibly to my rubber soles. I wore them to fit in with the other servers. Trickle of sweat down left side. Stifling behind this curtain. Breath misting on the glass. Outside. The City. Orange reflector lights fencing in mid-air and bouncing off buildings.
I have that bottle of the drink she likes. Brewed in the Desert. I bought it last Fromemass. Specially for this.
I am here because Emily left. I am here to show this woman that I am better than she is. That I am better than every incarnation of her. People think I’m not the kind of man to do this. Well, what does anybody know? I know exactly what kind of man I am. The kind who has worked too long with other people’s memories. It’s time I made a meaningful one of my own.
Remnants of cannelloni in some kind of creamy red sauce. Smacking lips. A lit cigar and that acrid smell.
I have it in my pocket. The Frome-antidote I like to call it. It’s really just a little phial of very strong rat poison. The stuff I used to use in the Memory Processing Plant. I kept it in the cupboard in the kitchenette, next to the coffee. It’s a wonder I never had a very painful mix-up.
The bottle said fast-acting. Faster when combined with alcohol. And undetectable on any autopsy report. Why you’d need that for rats I didn’t understand. Now I’m glad whoever labelled it had me in mind. It’s Tuesday. I distinctly remember because today is the day I received the university letter, informing me that my fabricated results had been found out.
Tuesday is also the day that Emily left me.
There is a beautiful symmetry to this. Poetry. That’s how I know this is really happening.
And she’s off to the toilet. Shuffling. She looks more decrepit than I remember her from the posters. Lonel
ier. It’s strange to see her here in reality.
Are these second thoughts?
No. That woman ruined my career. Set me up. Robbed me of the truth – among other things – but that’s what stings most. There is nothing quite like it in the world. You develop feelings. Honest feelings. Make love to a person. Feel understood. Accepted. And then you find out that that person does not exist. Never did. And you were shouting all your secrets into a huge Government loud-speaker. Humiliation. All of those green-coated idiots in walnut-panelled state rooms, laughing at Lucian Ffogg. Duped, foolish Lucian. Who placed his trust in a mirage. Ran rollicking into the sand and feasted on it.
No. No second thoughts.
I hear the gentle fizz of the powder in the whisky glass. The bubbles play. Too beautiful to be so poisonous. Yet deadly.
That was it. The engram that would seal his fate – as the perpetrator of the first successful assassination attempt of any Head of State the City had ever seen (in any of its incarnations through time). Emily didn’t know about how her mother had slowly poisoned Malcolm Drawbridge. Even if she had, that wasn’t on the record. Lucian Ffogg would have his place in the history books and Arc-Hives of the City and every City to come.
He may be vomiting again – honestly, worse than any toddler, worse than Icara when she was growing up – but he would be remembered.
He would like to be remembered as a maverick or a rebel. She knew him inside out. And she would give him what he wanted. A member of the City’s resistance movement. FOG. Freedom or the gallows. Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Emily. We have to get rid of the old woman first. To the desert. Where she sent you. A body that old won’t survive the fifty-degree heat. It couldn’t survive the temperate environment of the walnut-coated study without a new pancreas every three weeks. And if it did, the Tranquelle withdrawal would finish the job. A slow death, but a rapid psychotic deterioration. Alone in the desert. Poetic justice.
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