iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  How did he get all of this tech down here without iRemember noticing?

  Gurk hadn’t gathered this treasure trove himself. He had called on insurgent contacts who had tunnelled this through to him.

  ‘I know some people,’ he said, in response to Icara’s shocked face.

  ‘You have access to iRemember?’

  ‘I can see, Inspector, that I’m going to have to explain more than a few things to you. Please. Sit down.’ He motioned to a console chair.

  He began by explaining the Shadow-web. So much more than iRemember. Like the digital equivalent of the Off-Gridder tunnels under the City. A mirror image, running beneath iRemember. Giving a deeper, fuller picture.

  ‘And what’s better, Inspector, is that it can’t be detected. It is like a parasite, piggy-backing off the servers. iRemember can sense it’s there, but can’t do anything about it.’

  ‘How has this not been stopped?’

  ‘That’s what I came down here to show you.’ He grabbed a screw-jack from a dark corner and jabbed at the ceiling tiles. One of them came down in a cloud of bluish dust.

  Icara choked and spluttered. Gurk seemed to be immune to the particle-filled air. Where the tile fell it left a thin veil of light blue.

  Gurk licked his finger and collected the particles on a moist fingertip.

  ‘Lethene,’ he said, his voice shaking with pride and awe. Every time he thought of how Lucian had come up with the stuff, he felt like crying. Like when he listened to really good opera. ‘These tiles are full of it. They create a protective layer between me and iRemember. It’s like a veil. A black hole. Antimatter. iRemember’s blind spot. And it’s a product of the same beautiful purple plants that gave us Tranquelle – the City’s keyhole into the minds of its Citizens. It’s actually beautiful, isn’t it?’ added Gurk, twisting his fingertip so the Inspector could see it better.

  The blue tip looked like it was covered in frosting. Like the Lake when Frome froze it over in artificial winter at Fromemass. With Citizens skating over it to the tunes of Tranquelle jingles.

  But Icara wasn’t so easily convinced. Frome’s media arm had worked long and hard to ensure that people didn’t believe that Lethene could be possible.

  What is it with the old guard and the obsession with Lethene?

  Even so, she bent down to look at the ceiling tile. What if it was true? It would be the perfect way for Papa G to be forgotten by the outbrains. And something else was beginning to crystallise in the mind of the ex-Inspector. Lot 458 might have been covered in the same material. Was that what Lucian had his own little orchard of Tranquelle plants out in the desert for? It would explain why she hadn’t been able to access iRemember while she was there.

  ‘I’m sorry Mr Caplan, but I just can’t imagine Lucian Ffogg as an engrammer, working in a lab.’

  Gurk shuffled over to a console chair and slumped into its soft, doughy seat.

  ‘Luckily, Inspector, you don’t have to imagine it. Because it really happened. And it was captured by iRemember. It’s all on Lucian’s file. Why don’t you pull up a chair? The Shadow-web is a much better storyteller than I would be.’

  Icara picked up the cracked hardware, gingerly. It stuck to her fingers. The reek of illegal hardware and pigeon gizzards would never wash off. She hooked herself in and pulled on the visor. Within seconds, she wished she hadn’t. The past rushed around her, like a cold wind.

  ***

  A few days after Gurk had ignored Lucian and given him the silent treatment for what he felt was long enough to show the new kid who was boss, he made them both a cup of terrible coffee, and sat Lucian down for a chat.

  Gurk wasn’t overly free with his life story. If Lucian wanted to know, he could find it all on iRemember. But that day it was easier to tell it his way. It turned out that Gurk hated the City and the ‘Automaton in Office’ as much as Lucian did. If not more. He had grown up in the Belt. In a no-mine zone. Before the air became a gaseous death shroud for the Belters, shortening their life expectancy by half.

  The City had moved in with its desperate need for precious metals and its voracious appetite for Tranquelle. The Brethren had claimed his mother’s land. Simply written her out of their land register. It was the flick of a pen on paper. And there was no arguing with paper.

  Without land, there were not many choices for a poor Belter family. Really there was only one choice. The City. And once there, the Service Industry. When Gurk was young, the Bureau didn’t take Belters. But Gurk made himself an exception. He excelled. And he had been waiting a long time to get even with the architect of his family’s demise. Helena Frome.

  He couldn’t believe his luck when Lucian fell into his compound.

  The boy genius who had the formula for Lethene in his head. The within-surgent, as Gurk called him. Gurk liked wordplay almost as much as he hated the Bureau.

  Together they synthesised enough Lethene to cover the walls of a single room. One space in their lives could be free from state surveillance. It worked. What happened in the bunker wouldn’t be remembered by the state machine. It was a defiant stand. Tile by painstakingly tacked-on tile, they created absent amnesiac slices in the great big memory of the City. Cutting chunks out of the iRemember cheese. Lucian had wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to inject the Lethene. It wasn’t toxic. But Gurk had a fear of needles and a terror of what he called ‘foreign bodies’ entering his system. He only consented to swallowing enough to prevent total Tranquelle withdrawal. And the tiles.

  By the time Gurk retired, he and Lucian had managed to cover the entire structure of the central headquarters of Lot 458 and most of the surrounding outbuildings and hangars in a layer of Lethene two inches thick.

  That iRemember file ended there, as the final slice was eaten by blue oblivion.

  ***

  Icara pulled off the visor, feeling the residual twitch of history passing through her synapses, like evaporating liquid. She felt sick. She had seen the University halls. The evisceration of Lucian’s research in the press. There was a lot of missing footage. There was a lot of heat-damage to the Bioware. But the story was clear to see.

  ‘There’s more,’ whispered Papa G. ‘If you thought that was bad...wait till I show you the mother-load. The stuff I managed to liberate from a server in Hangar 3.’

  He shuffled over to a cabinet, punched in a code and pulled out a reclaimed plastic memory stick, full of sloshing Bioware. The kind Icara had last seen on a museum visit with the Academy. He looked at the liquid as it sloshed, as if it was sacred.

  ‘It’s one of a kind. No copies made. It’s the key. The key to the end of iRemember. And Helena Frome.’

  The Inspector looked unconvinced. But the old man had already surprised her once that night.

  He plugged the Bioware into Icara’s console chair. There was a fizz and gurgle as the past rushed through the Inspector’s body.

  Memories scrolled with their identifiers in the top right-hand corner...

  The sound that Tranquelle stalks make when there’s lots of them and it’s windy. I’ll always remember this.

  Fromemass day. Bright and colourful – with an incredible tree. But my dog Alfred was sick. They had to put him down. No sparkly details this Fromemass. When I look back on it I’ll see what I see now...the inside of the vet’s surgery. And how I kept thinking I didn’t want to leave Alfred here with all these strangers. He would be cold and scared and afraid. There’s a resigned dullness to the way he moves that makes me think he understands. I’ve taken his life in my hands. And he trusts me with it. He trusts me to tell him when it’s time to stop living. This is horrible.

  Sunset...

  Sunset...

  Sunset...

  Icara scratched. The visor and the heat of Gurk’s shop were making her temples itch. Citizens’ lives were boring. She pulled it off a few times. Her arms twitched with t
he recalled impulses as she scrolled through them. Everyone remembers the same things...

  ...Sunset.

  So Gurk had just been pulling her leg. Nothing.

  The deep bellyache of disappointment.

  And then, without really realising what she was seeing, ex-Inspector Swansong hit the corruption mother-load.

  It was the most toxic collection of engrams she had encountered in her entire time with the Bureau. Scenes from cases she had personally worked on. Where evidence had gone missing. She recognised, in a few places, the greasy forehead and countenance of Ronnie Spoon. But Ronnie was small fry. In fact, it turned out he was sort of a good guy.

  The stick was full of highly ranked Bureaucrats turning Bureaucracy into a dirty word.

  Getting away with murder. In the case of one Anne Pattew, Frome’s secretary before Louis, quite literally. She fast-forwarded through at least thirty memories of the Cardinal breaking one of the Tenets by indulging in illegal activities. Some were tamer than others. Big Brother, she discovered, liked gambling, and the feeling of baked fowl slithering down his throat. And other parts of his anatomy. And the anatomies of others. He also liked Tranquelle. From which he should have been abstaining. He liked Tranquelle a lot.

  And then the memories went from bad to worse. As much as the populace would doubtlessly love to see their Cardinal wallowing nude in a paddling pool of pigeon fat, what came next was more what Project Eraser meant, when it said ‘in the public interest’.

  Big Brother meeting with the head of the Mining Committee. Agreeing to tear down more Belter homesteads and lower the air-quality standards again. For cases and cases full of what Icara knew without looking were Frome dollars and a stake in ChemTech’s new anti-ageing cosmetics business.

  ‘iRemember sees everything. Remembers everything.’

  Icara remembered the Academy recruits droning the anthem, over and over again.

  Her beautiful world was crumbling with every fresh engram that passed through her. Jolts of electricity.

  Gurk was sitting on a gold mine. An explosive scandal. Why hadn’t he gone public?

  The excitement of finding so much on one cheap memory stick made out of reclaimed plastic made Icara almost miss the next memory.

  ...I can feel the soft leather give under my weight. Which is probably higher these days than it should be. But who cares? I have drowned myself in eye-watering liquor and choked myself with trans-fats and Tranquelle. And nothing seems to work. Not the Dreammaker. Not the sleeping pills. Not the daily drinking.

  They won’t let me die.

  But this. This is better.

  I feel the familiar suck of the plastic as it rests on my temples with that special pressure. The feeling just before everything happens.

  I feel my fingers gently scroll around the pad on each arm rest. Tuning in.

  I stopped being selective a long time ago.

  Just press play. Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe it’ll be someone remembering the first time they ate a lemon. If I can just have that, maybe I’ll be able to sleep tonight...

  Icara’s whole face went numb, and there was a strange fizzing in her ears. Like drowning in soda water. The memory was reanimated like an emotional Frankenstein’s monster, relived by Icara’s every nerve and twitching tendon – real and full of colour. The pain was real, too.

  The Inspector pressed the emergency shut-off. She tore off the visor. Felt her heart thumping in her chest and struggled to breathe.

  Helena Frome. Icara’s hands were shaking.

  It explained why Gurk had been keeping quiet. The Cardinal was one thing. But having a stick full of Bad Memories featuring cameos from the Head of State? You couldn’t ask for a more powerful enemy.

  ‘She was storing it all at the Lot. She must have known about the Lethene all along,’ said Icara to herself. Gurk was watching her, nodding sadly.

  She could hardly hear him over the beating of her own heart. Quiet. The voice of the truth.

  ‘Frome stole Lethene, Inspector, so that she could patent it herself and sell it at a mark-up of a million per cent to the highest bidder. Do you know how much a single tab of the stuff goes for on the Shadow-web? The City’s got a Lethene problem, Inspector. And the problem isn’t that it’s being used. It’s who’s using it. The antidote to all of this,’ said Gurk, gesturing at his surroundings, ‘and she didn’t want any of us to have it. Now, I’m a man who likes equality. And I think if Frome has the right to be dis-remembered, then everyone should have the right to a little bit of forgetting. Don’t you? It shouldn’t matter who our mothers and fathers are, should it, Icara Swansong? The Off-Gridders are working. But it’s slow work, and usually deadly. The typical life-span of an Off-Gridder is, oh...usually shorter than that of your average Tranquelle plant! Shorter even than the life of a Belt farmer! But slowly we’re spreading a little bit of our very own amnesia around.’

  ‘But Lucian said, before he...’ no one wanted to say it, ‘he said Frome knew what the Off-Gridders were doing.’

  ‘She has informants. She pays well. Unlike the Head of State, I don’t have the City treasury at my disposal. You can’t blame an Off-Gridder for wanting to eat, now, can you, Miss Swansong?’

  Frome had her fingers in everyone’s pie.

  That’s why she took so long to sign up to Little Brother’s Project Eraser. That’s why she didn’t want me working on Lucian’s case. Lethene is the very reason that I am no longer employed for the Bureau.

  Out loud she said, ‘The lies have to stop. iRemember should be about preserving the truth. Recalling things, exactly as they were. Not selectively mis-remembering! The Citizens deserve to know. And Frome should be tried. By her own Brethren Court. Just like anybody else. They all should.’

  There was the sound of a window breaking and something huge and heavy falling overhead, as if Frome had heard them and was going to put a stop to all this talk of honesty and trials. Gurk froze. Icara felt the creep of panic. After all, what’s a few tiles of Lethene to the most sophisticated surveillance software in human history? She shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable, watching old engrams and wallowing in dusty soft furnishings. How could she have let herself get carried away? They were living in iRemember.

  ‘Were you followed here?’

  ‘No. I would have noticed. Maybe you’ve got customers?’ asked Icara with a nervous little laugh.

  There was no one on the railway. Nothing. I would have noticed.

  There was definitely someone above them now. She could hear heavy footfalls, and the crashing of furniture. Another shiver ran down her spine. This reminded her of the training videos of Off-Gridder tunnel raids. She had always been the hunter in those scenarios. It didn’t feel good on the other side. Adrenal glands working too hard made her light-headed and giddy.

  Gurk pulled the memory stick from the panel and handed it to the Inspector.

  ‘Take it,’ he whispered, ‘go public with it. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe I still believed the City had some good in it. Take it. It won’t help you find Lucian. But you’re a Swansong. You are close enough to the Bureau to take it down.’

  The crashes upstairs were getting louder.

  ‘Maybe it’s thieves, coming for your cash register.’

  ‘I know thieves when I hear them. And they’d have taken the money and run by now. No. There was someone here earlier. Strange voice. Big Bureau umbrella. Unsavoury character. It’s time for you to leave, Inspector.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ said Icara.

  ‘There might not be any. Take the memory stick and get out. You’re running out of time, Inspector!’

  The footfalls were very heavy. Whatever was up there had found Gurk’s storeroom ladder. The rungs bent under black leather boots. The reclaimed plastic groaned.

  Icara didn’t ask Gurk if he would run with her. She had see
n him shuffling around. He was much too old. She took the memory stick, without meeting his eye. She felt her hands shaking as she tugged at the zipper of her duffle bag.

  Gurk pointed to the back wall. Behind a crudely made cloth curtain Icara saw the mouth of an Off-Gridder tunnel yawning. There was a small drop onto hand-poured concrete.

  For the second time that night, she would be going deeper underground.

  How could she have thought that there was anywhere the City’s big eyes couldn’t see her?

  ‘Gurk Caplan, you’re under arrest by order of the Brethren. For aiding and abetting terrorist activity in the Belt, for falsifying your death and avoiding the judgment of Scientifically Proven God,’ she heard the intruder saying. Mechanical. The voice of a guillotine. The voice of the Bureaucracy.

  She slid down into the hole.

  Gurk didn’t talk back. He might have wanted to but he didn’t have time. The sound a silenced gun makes as it ends a conversation could be heard behind the curtain. Icara didn’t wait to hear any more. She started running. Off-Gridder hands had hung glow-sticks made out of reclaimed cores of street-lighting drones on the walls. One at every twenty paces. Icara ran harder, her breath painful, cold and dry at the back of her throat and her chest pounding, like a Sub-Urban night-box. The ones with the sticky dance-floors, where they confiscate your weapons at the door.

  What would she do now? She couldn’t go back home. She could hear another body moving quickly in the darkness behind her. She imagined what it would feel like for a bullet to enter the small soft space at the base of the skull. Without seeing it, Icara knew that Gurk Caplan was no longer merely retired. A life in the Sub-Urbs wasn’t worth the cost of a neutraliser bullet. And the life of a traitor to the Bureau selling street-food in the Sub-Urbs was worth even less.