Then, dreamed Emily, the mourning daughter, taking over the matriarchal throne at the head of the State Mnemonic Department, would cry at her mother’s funeral. The familiar orange and gold logo draped across the hand-made walnut coffin. With nothing inside it.
Emily would no longer be an outcast.
She would forgive her mother and the Bureau.
And she would take control. She would hold the City, as she held the now vomiting Lucian Ffogg. She would hold the City’s memory like a marble in her fist. She could do whatever she wanted with the City’s past. And with that she would have full control of its future.
It was frightening. Even to Emily Swansong...
Whisky. Bubbles. Dark, toffee champagne. Little crystals at the bottom of the glass. Spreading. Dissolving. Like a desert heat haze at the bottom of the glass. Mirage.
He should have known. The Swansongs were good at theatre. A puff of smoke, a sleight of hand, it’s just what the people need. They crave it. Brightly coloured puppets.
Lucian had borrowed an itchy black suit from a friend. It hung a little wide around the middle, and a little long around the heels. To others, he looked like a boy trying on his father’s clothes. But he was alone. He admired his reflection in the quarter-length mirror, oblivious to how silly he looked. He felt like a Lark Westwing or a Jorg Cloons – that is to say, an old-time entertainment star, the epitome of sophistication. He had arranged to meet Emily at Fred’s cocktail bar. It was in the nice old part of the City, the University District, surrounded by winking fairy lights and robotic oak trees that looked exactly like the real thing. The cocktails cost more than Lucian could afford. But it was a special night. It was Emily’s birthday. He was going to tell her how he felt and give her the present he had spent weeks picking out at the little antique jeweller’s kiosk. And then he was going to ask Emily to marry him.
He steeled his nerves, winked at himself in the mirror – just like he had seen celebrities do in the ads. He straightened his shoulders and breathed in.
He caught sight of her slip lying across his bed in the reflection. It was pink satin. Which was appropriate, as it was what he felt his interior organs were suddenly made of, slipping over each other. The sinking feeling. Something was wrong. The slip-slip-slipping of satin on satin – kidney over spleen. Stomach over oesophagus. Over and out.
He felt, and he could not quite say why, that the pink slip was artificial somehow. It wasn’t that it was a reflection. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on exactly. Just like when you look at a vase of red plastic flowers in a hotel lobby. There is something about their waxy perfection. And you just know. That they aren’t real flowers. He had been allowed a glimpse behind the curtain – he was the audience of a perfectly orchestrated drama. It was all too perfect. Like a VR game. Emily was too perfect. She was like a star from a Tranquelle ad. Like a vision of what he had thought women should be like when he was growing up. In fact, now he came to think of it – it was as if someone had built her having read his iRemember profile from that time. She didn’t feel like a real person.
But he ignored the feeling.
This feeling was just nerves, he told himself. Nothing but cold feet before his perfect moment. He cleared his throat. He shook his head to clear it. And then, feeling like the hero in a bad play again, left his college room and made his way to Fred’s.
It was a cold day, and the walk helped to clear his head.
But he couldn’t shake the sinking feeling – like a reverse vomit in the pit of his stomach. An ache.
Then, all of a sudden, about ten minutes before he reached Fred’s the feeling stopped being a reverse vomit and became a vomit pure and simple. Panic spewed out onto the cobblestones of the University District. Gowned academics that passed him gave him disgusted glances. But there was nothing he could do. So he held onto some railings and gave way to it. Hot panic. Chunking onto the pavement.
And then it was over.
His head felt clear. He remembered why he had come to Fred’s in the first place. That Emily was the perfect jigsaw piece that fit him. They were going to be happy. Because they had already been happy for a year. And he never wanted this feeling of belonging to end. He never wanted to stop feeling as if he had come home.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The suit didn’t matter any more. He would have walked into Fred’s in his underpants. The fact that he smelt slightly of vinegary bile didn’t matter either.
Feeling sure and steady on his feet, he made his way to the renovated church where Fred’s cocktail bar shone, resplendent – like a pair of well-oiled buttocks on a beach towel by the Lake.
He marched right up the steps.
And he saw an empty cocktail glass on an empty table. Emily’s powder compact and shawl beside it. And the corner of a green, knee-length dress disappearing behind a pillar.
He did not know then that that was the last he would ever see of Emily.
An almost-presence. A stain.
But it was. He never saw her again.
There was more holding of railings later. And further loss of bodily fluids, as he wondered how a human body had so much liquid to lose. Especially as he stopped eating for a week. Three weeks after Emily’s mysterious disappearance Lucian was thrown out of the University for suspected insurgent activity. All of his lab work and computers were requisitioned. Disgrace. Then came the familiar part. The sleeping on his mother’s couch. Enduring the suspicious glances of neighbours. Until finally he couldn’t take it any more. And the Bureaucracy that had finished him offered him a lifeline. In the desert.
The desert time was the wilderness time. His friendship with Gurk. Their nights painting the walls with Lethene. During which heavy bass-guitar riffs melded with fragmented dreams of reality that might have been real or might really have been dreams. He had experimented with hundreds of different ways of using Lethene. Sometimes he forgot which was which.
Surely, it couldn’t all have been fake? Emily had not been a plastic flower. She had been a real woman. And she had really left him. At Fred’s cocktail bar. In the University District. Where the fairy lights twinkle…
The headache overwhelmed him. And then the sour pain behind his back teeth, that told him he would vomit. It was like being transported. Right back to that night when he had lost everything. Love, his degree, the will to live. Lucian rolled onto his back, preparing to give up the ghost again. A tiny grey aphid regurgitated by life. A pointed green stiletto came too close to piercing a hole in his left earlobe.
A voice clung to the air above him, and Emily’s face poked through a Tranquelle cloud.
She looked distended up there. Like a tower with a chignon.
‘It’s almost over, Lu...’
She was right. It was almost over. Persistent weak memories are like black holes. They suck in reality, and bend and shape it. They have a morbid, dangerous gravity. Memory is decay. Decay of matter. And matter wants to matter – not decay. Like all life, the almost-face of Emily disappearing behind that pillar did not want to die. She was gradually turning and changing into something entirely different. Emily was eating, and growing. Expanding. Metamorphosing. Chewing on everything – a huge, gaping mouth – eating it all, skin, bones and gristle. The memory’s cheeks were glowing and chomping, and dripping drool. She was out for her own survival. Latching on to any nourishment she could get. Bending, twisting, and becoming a memory of an assassination attempt never attempted.
Science fiction got it wrong. And so did science for a while. Very little is required to fabricate an engram. Nothing really but dope and some good old-fashioned storytelling. Oh, and a few well-administered electric shocks. Stories are what keep our memories alive. And we’re always hungry for them. Data on which to gorge our central nervous system. We have no way of telling if they are true or false. We simply yearn for more of them. What difference is there between stories and m
emories in the end? Nothing but spelling. Lucian’s synapses opened wide and let all the misinformation rush in, repainting the past.
***
Paint flakes. Rusting iron bars poking through concrete. Crumbling stone. Icara made her way down and down, taking elevators deeper and deeper through Sector Z and into the ruinous Sub-Urbs. The City was a shadow underneath. So different, she couldn’t really think of it as the City any more. This was the place the City proper had climbed over to get to the top. People here lived as if it was the dark ages. There was hardly any tech. The walkways didn’t light up as your feet touched them. There was no ambient lighting. In the patches of lighter shadow cast by ancient-looking LEDs she saw things she wished she hadn’t. All the kinds of things people do when no one’s looking. The kinds of things that never happened in the upper layers, where surveillance followed you, from inside your head. She had thought her grandmother’s subjugation of the Sub-Urbs had been a great success. That’s what she had been taught at the Academy, along with everyone else. She was beginning to see what success meant. It just meant a closing of the big Frome eyes. Saving on the City’s electricity bill by switching off the power.
Frome had abandoned these Citizens. In fact, she had signed a charter that recognised that they were not really Citizens at all. Frome had thought of it as win-win. Because they didn’t have access to the information, they didn’t realise how far they’d been left behind. Some of the skulking shapes in the shadows even seemed happy. Which was baffling, but, Icara reasoned, it must be because they can’t see their own misery. It’s so dark down here, may Scientifically Proven God help them.
She’d got on the railway, feeling like a criminal for not having to present her ID. She waited for administrators. Announcements. Nothing. The railway just jolted and juddered. It was also dark. And empty, apart from the odd drunk. And a man who was looking for his trousers. Through a gap where a carriage door should have been she saw a checkpoint flash red: You are now entering Blue Haven.
This was it.
The look in Icara’s eye would have been the look that sailors had in earlier times when they approached the big waterfall tumbling right off and over the lip of the flat earth.
As she got out of the carriage, she crossed herself and looked up. She could see nothing but endless air-conditioning vents and some kind of gunk that lined everything down here. But she imagined it was up there somewhere. And above it was Scientifically Proven God. A guiding light in all this murk. She knew where she was going. She’d checked her downloaded iRemember file a hundred times, all the while alert for thieves. She had reached the meridian. Blue Haven stretched out beneath her. A haven it was not.
She closed her eyes and crossed the line. Into the unknown.
Nothing happened.
There were no groups of scowling locals carrying pointed weapons. She did not have to pull out the canister of Liquid Scream. There was no sudden apocalypse.
All of that was yet to come.
There was just one lonely Tranquelle kiosk. And, just like in the engram eddy, a reclaimed plastic sign: Dr Magrat Smog. It was late, but time is a free-for-all in a place with no sky. Icara had expected to find a night-box full of gamblers. Ronnie Spoon’s shell. Dr Magrat’s was more than a shell. It was a doctor’s surgery. There were Off-Gridders lined up outside muttering quietly, their bodies covered in burns from agricultural run-off. They were joined by others. A baby bawled and then started coughing. A terrifying rattle. Lung burn. The sound of tiny lungs, like tea bags steeped in poison air. Icara joined the queue and smiled at the baby. It cried louder. As if it could see the Bureau beneath her skin. Eventually, the screaming baby was carried in. It didn’t come out.
Inspector Swansong would never have felt sorry for these people. Inspector Swansong would have taken out her service weapon and arrested the whole lot. Inspector Swansong wouldn’t have noticed the length and breadth of the burns, the swollen skin. How much they must hate the City, to risk their own skin in burning it down. Inspector Swansong wouldn’t have asked why.
A twitching cipher of a man was just ahead of Icara. More tech than man. One of his numberless implants had not gone well. His face was swollen and weeping. Can’t have been more than nineteen. She had seen a few people like him before. Tech junkies. The streets of the Sub-Urbs were lined with them. This one had a nasty rash of wearable tech that ran up both forearms. Maybe there was more under his clothes. Frome’s Board of Health had banned the tech implants when Icara was a teen. The slogans from the time had used words like ‘machine’, and ‘inhuman’. Inspector Swansong had never thought about the slogans before. Icara thought she had never seen anything more human than the scared-looking man, dabbing at his swollen face, hoping the pain would go away.
Words could be so powerful. And so wrong. She remembered seeing her own name. A word up on a Mem-Convict screen.
She overheard a conversation in which the word Bureaucrat spat through chapped lips. Followed by the words slit and throat. Then gleeful laughter.
Icara pulled the hood further over her face, trying to disguise her temples as best she could. She was vastly outnumbered here. Even if she told them she’d lost her job, she doubted they would hear her. She’d be an ersatz Frome. A human replica of the Bureau in miniature. With no service weapon for protection. No back-up. She shivered and waited with her eyes closed.
She had been looking at the Bureau upside down for years. The doll with two faces. One face was smiling. But change your point of view and you’d see the other. Coughing up its lungs in a Sub-Urban surgery, a glass bottle jammed into its windpipe.
Then it was Icara’s turn.
Inside the surgery it was surprisingly clean and quiet. A burly nurse pointed her to a red door. She went in, rehearsing what she would say. Wondering what she would find. Who was Magrat Smog? Would she even remember signing Gurk’s death certificate? Worse still, what if she had signed it because Gurk really was dead?
It was a small room. A screen fenced off a sink. Icara could see the shadow of the doctor, cleaning up.
‘Trousers off and up on the gurney. You’re in luck. We’ve just had a new crate of cream in. Fell off the back of the Temple’s own medi-transit pod. The rash should clear up in a week. You’ll be back to work in no time.’
Icara wracked her brains for how to start the conversation. Remember Gurk Caplan? You know, he died in your arms. That Gurk…are you sure he’s dead? I mean, really, how could you know?
Was she really about to do this? Yes. She would treat it just like any interrogation.
The doctor emerged from behind the screen. The tense set of her shoulders told Icara she had already noticed the bruises, the tell-tale love bites of iRemember.
‘Get out,’ said the doctor. ‘We don’t treat people like you here.’
Icara opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She was frozen to the spot.
She heard the sound of a pistol being cocked. She thought the Bureau had managed to get all remaining firearms out of circulation years ago. Evidently, the deadly antiques had just been thrown into the sea of the Sub-Urbs and sunk to the bottom.
‘Didn’t you hear me, Bureaucrat garbage? Get out of my surgery before they take you out in a bag.’
There was no use lying. The bruises were clear to see.
‘I’m…I’m not here on Bureau business. I’m trying to find out what happened to a friend of a friend. You signed his death certificate a couple of years ago.’
Wow, she thought. That was terrible. Still, if she could just keep her talking, she might have enough time to think.
‘I sign a lot of death certificates. What can I say? People die a lot in the Sub-Urbs. Mostly it’s Bureaucrats like you that kill them. I’m surprised someone hasn’t finished you off in revenge. They must all recognise the woman who tried to put Ronnie Spoon behind bars?’
‘I’m not here to arrest anyo
ne...’
‘Spare me the details. There’s only one reason Bureaucrats ever come down here and it’s to cause more damage. You know what that cost us? Do you know how many people died when Ronnie’s money was cut off?’
Ronnie Spoon? Wheeler and dealer extraordinaire, helping babies with Lung burn? Icara laughed at the thought.
‘You think death’s funny? We are people you know. Just like you. Better than you, in fact. Now I’m not going to ask you again. I suspect you’ve never seen a gun-shot wound. Not as clean as your service weapons. No respect for soft furniture. I don’t want my nurses picking Bureaucrat brains out of the carpet for weeks. We’ve got better things to do.’
‘We let Ronnie go,’ said Icara, still playing for time. She scanned the doctor’s desk for anything she could use. Like she did when she was surfing the engram files. Become someone else, but stay yourself. There was nothing. Just pill bottles. A picture of a young child in a holo-frame. A niece? A daughter? A digital death certificate. Freshly signed. The baby from the queue. She felt sick and opted for the truth.
‘I’m just…another victim of the system, really. Looking for a friend. And I think you can help.’
‘I didn’t get to where I am by helping Bureau scum. Ronnie told me about you. You’re the worst kind. You believe in iRemember.’
What did she mean by that? What else was there to believe in? She had to stay focused. The pistol remained cocked. Magrat hadn’t fired it yet.
Gurk. Gurk. Tell her about Gurk. Just say his name. Maybe it will be enough.
‘Gurk Caplan. Ever heard of him? He was a friend of mine.’
The doctor’s face changed. Good old Gurk. He was obviously a celebrity.
‘He’s been dead for years,’ came the words after a long pause, ‘what does the Bureau want with a dead man?’
You didn’t have to be a Rank 4 to see that the doctor was all flavours of lying. Pigeon wings! Icara had struck the jackpot. If she got the doctor rattled enough, maybe she’d try to make contact with the recently resurrected Gurk Caplan.
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