Icara hadn’t run like this since the Academy treadmills. Treadmills never prepare you for the sheer burning misery of the real thing. The tunnel was straight and paved for about 500 metres, like a sewer pipe. But eventually it began to wind and bend. The ground became soft under her feet, and crumbly. She was running on soil. A rabbit. In a rabbit warren, dug by Off-Gridders. Running from Helena Frome’s butcher’s knife.
The makeshift lanterns ran out. Darkness pressed thick around her. Out of breath and in pain, the Inspector slowed. Turning back was not an option. There were wet patches in the dust, and lumps of detritus. The small, desiccated bodies of rodents that had left the comfort of their Sub-Urban nests. Running into complete darkness was terrifying. But not as frightening as the almost certain death that panted behind her.
I might be suffering. But as long as I can keep going, you have to keep going too. And maybe, just maybe, I can outrun you.
Scientifically Proven God didn’t seem to be taking sides that night. Whatever was behind Icara kept on coming. She could practically feel the body heat of her pursuer behind her. At one point, she thought she even brushed against some skin. It was soft and dimpled. She had to do something to disorientate them or she would end up right underneath the other’s heels. Painfully, with legs stiffening beneath her, she grabbed the can of Liquid Scream from her duffle bag, pulled the pin and threw it behind her.
The stuff was designed for use by agents on Off-Gridder raids. The pitch was so high that it stopped your quarry in its tracks and made it curl up in agony on the floor. Icara covered her ears as the liquid gushed, filling the empty spaces in the tunnel, covering everything and letting out its nerve-rending whine. She kept on running.
‘The trouble with mnemonic surveillance is that while we are dealing with perfect records, we are always one step behind. That’s why your Government has invested heavily in the Protection Industry.’
Helena Frome,
speech to Protection Industry employees, ’98
Emily put down her slim, touch-screen wireless. It had been a long evening. She had worked long and hard on Little Lu. She had been hoping for good news.
Now she rubbed her temples and waited for the irritation that was dancing through her to subside.
Of course the memory stick was gone. Someone had been down there with the old man. Someone had taken it.
No matter. The stick had been out there for a long time. If the Off-Gridder scum hadn’t gone public by now, there was no reason for them to suddenly unleash hell. Besides, Frome owned all the entertainment channels. It would be practically impossible to leak something so incendiary.
But what if they succeeded?
A public scandal could ruin her plans. It might put the succession in question.
Now, now, Emily. That’s negative talk.
Maybe she could use it to her advantage. Either way, she wouldn’t know until she had it. And had seen exactly what was on it. Frome would be after it too. She would have to get to it before her mother did.
Part of the plan had been to get the stick and Lucian along with it. It had been genius. Symmetrical. Perfect. But she had forgotten all about Gurk Caplan. Why couldn’t the disgusting Belter, with his greasy fingers, have stayed dead? Frome had been too liberal. Letting it all flow around the City like a river, people like flotsam and jetsam from the Sub-Urbs and the Belt. The first thing she would do would be to build some kind of wall. Keep the Sub-Urbs out. Keep the Belters well and truly out. Or maybe even raze the lot of it to the ground. Start again.
She didn’t like the feeling of being out of control.
What was really irritating was that she’d lost Icara. She had blinked out of iRemember the night Frome had fired her. Maybe she was already dead. There was ambition there, to be sure. The iRemember files were testament to that. But her daughter was naive. Soft putty. Moulded by the Brethren. She really believed in iRemember. Emily didn’t think there was a Bureau employee left that believed like Icara believed. Frome had sent her to Lot 458 and was now obviously using her in a grander scheme. Poor, stupid Icara. Caught up in Frome’s web. Emily allowed herself a brief, soft thought.
It was over.
What mattered now was the memory stick.
She typed a message.
GET IT. IF YOU CAN’T GET IT, FIND SOMEWHERE GOOD TO HIDE. IF I DON’T GET YOU, FROME WILL.
She had the feeling that if she wanted something done, she would have to do it herself.
She tossed the visor from her lap and dabbed at the corners where iRemember connected. The skin was tender. She winced. She was ready for this endless watching and hiding to be over. She was ready to end the temple burn. She dabbed at the raw points, and the areas just above the ears. The skin that was starting to pucker and bruise. Worse than the usual Bureau love bites. Her bruises were becoming enormous sores, large and swollen, like overripe fruit.
The evening had left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.
Between clenched teeth she chanted her positivity mantras, like prayers. The plan was going perfectly. All would be well.
***
Frome wasn’t having a much better day. But it beat fruitless Committee briefings.
The visor came down again. The crack of a bottle seal. The rush of the minds of others. Darkness.
Outside, beyond the carpeted office of the Head of State, the City waited under energy-efficient lights. Waited for change. It was empty. Spaces without people. The moon was strong, its enormous rocky face enhanced by the geodesic dome. Like a human face, staring into a fishbowl. Had it a brain to think with, the moon would have thought sad thoughts about the many human tragedies unfolding under that dome.
Frome had a brain to think with, but she was using it to live vicariously. The iRemember files of the most boring Bureau employees were sometimes the best, on nights like this. Their banal lives unfolded like perfect flowers. Individual, yet all the same. The fullness of memories that weren’t her own.
***
Miraculously, after what felt like hours but was really only five more minutes of half-running, half-falling, Icara emerged from the tunnel. She crawled through a sewer grating in a side street in the City. Dawn was beginning to spread across the sky like spilled Belter stew. Clouds crawled across the surface, thin and purple like the veins in cooked Tranquelle leaves.
Icara didn’t recognise the neighbourhood. But she was well and truly out of the Sub-Urbs. The dome, the pfut pfut of the misters, and street signs all told her so.
She dusted herself down and thanked Scientifically Proven God for the sight that spread before her as she turned the corner. A Tranquelle kiosk was opening for the morning, its electric window shutters rolling up sleepily. She ducked for cover behind it. The vendor straightened his cap and apron. It made Icara jump. She thought he had seen her. She half-expected to see her grandmother materialise under the cap (the regulation brown bowler worn by all the City’s vendors) to neutralise Icara herself. But there was nothing. Only the disinfecting lights, gently creeping over jagged surfaces of glass and metal, keeping the City clean. And the happy-looking man in the kiosk. The man who doesn’t know what his City is standing on, thought Icara.
I’ve just seen inside Helena Frome’s head. And inside the heads of the Brethren. I want to shout it at you. You’re selling lies. The City is too dirty to ever be clean again. Run away. But I don’t. I don’t do anything. Because my throat is parched from running and breathing in Liquid Scream. Because you wouldn’t believe me anyway. I don’t look like an upstanding Citizen any more. I look like I just ran through an Off-Gridder tunnel in the Sub-Urbs. And if I spoke to you you’d probably just call the Bureau Hotline.
Seeing inside Helena Frome was like seeing the inside of the piano that plays itself. The strings in the puppet theatre.
The kiosk glinted under the sanitising lights. A green line, like a laser caress, slid over t
he plastic packets of little pink pills. They were nestled inside their diaphanous cases like Fabergé eggs, shimmering in their casings. The disposable plastic wrapper was one soft screen. Playing out True Crime serials for the inhabitants of the City. Mobile entertainment. These serials were invariably set in the Belt. Citizens could watch them, as they took their daily dose, and feel safe surrounded by their concrete pillars and tarmac. Crime was something that happened somewhere else. The packets shone and glinted like hundreds of square little disco-lights, their screens broadcasting an episode entitled ‘Crime of Passion’. Set in a factory on the Belt. A foreman had murdered a love rival. Then buried him in a field full of Tranquelle, thinking no one would find him. Of course, the memory had been quickly seized by the Brethren. A quick arrest had been made. Frome’s system of surveillance had meted out swift justice once again.
Icara could not imagine murdering someone for love. The closest she had come to a relationship in the last three years was the feeling of intimate longing she had for the inside of Helena Frome’s office. A number of Bureau officers had tried. Gurk had said it, hadn’t he? She was Bureau royalty. They didn’t know that the Swansong women were, in their attitudes to each other, like a kind of mushroom. A throbbing fungus organism that asexually cloned itself. One part of the fungus wouldn’t care if the other part of the fungus stopped breathing. And the fungus parts certainly didn’t do each other any favours. Still, there had been suitors. And while they were using her to get to the top, she was also trying to use them to get to the top. Which resulted in a Möbius strip of immobility. If they could not secure her the big chair, they were a waste of time.
There was a pervasive numbness pulsing through the ex-Inspector as she watched the kiosk open. Losing your job is one thing. Losing your faith is another. Having seen the corruption she was so hoping to locate and stamp out, she wished she’d never found it. It was better when the worst she had seen of the world was Ronnie Spoon. It was better without the evidence. When she could still imagine that the nastiness was nothing but a bad dream. Having seen the stuff on Gurk’s memory stick – which sloshed in her duffle bag, heavy with horrible pasts – she wondered if it would ever be possible to clean up iRemember. She remembered the feeling she had had in Lot 458. Not enough Disinfect. The lights in the kiosk were hypnotic. Exhausted after a night of running, Icara just stood and stared. After Gurk’s street-food hut, she wanted to believe the ads on the packets of Tranquelle. She wanted to turn off the truth and tune in to a good, warm dose.
But the streets were starting to fill with Bureaucrats on their way to work. If she hurried, didn’t look directly at anyone, and kept to the side streets, she might be safe for a few hours, before Frome found her.
Casting her eyes over the Tranquelle packets, she finally found what she was looking for. She grabbed a security necklace, while the vendor wasn’t looking. A Keep-safe. Like the ones she’d seen Belter tourists carry around the City. They were tacky and the mixture of voice-activation and retinal scan security was old-fashioned and easy to hack. But it was better than a duffle bag. She’d put the memory stick in the Keep-safe. For safe keeping. While she was at it, she snatched a packet of Tranquelle vapes, and a few energy bars. Then, ducking out of sight, she gorged on one of the bars as if it was as rare as Glitz caviar, and not made out of protein grown in the same lab that had discovered Scientifically Proven God.
Where could she go now? Gurk had said to publish what was on the stick. But how? If she tried anything now she would surely be arrested. What would come after, she dreaded to think.
She had always loved the City. Her city. Her home. Now, it seemed menacing. A razor blade on an operating table, a blunt instrument at a bar brawl. She thought of her grandmother on her Chesterfield. Her bourbon smouldering in a glass. Her fingers steepled. That Cheshire-cat smile. The sallow complexion that came with age, stress, and possibly liver damage.
She started walking.
The memory of Gurk was burning a hole in her brain. A little, grey, shuffling man, and a little, grey, fast-moving bullet from a firearm that shouldn’t have existed. Service weapons didn’t sound like that. Burning contraband, shrivelled synapses. Broken bone. Unimaginable violence. She had never seen anyone killed by a bullet. The Bureau weapons were kinder. Designed to stun and immobilise. What she imagined was perhaps worse than the reality. The thick, sticky, iron-tasting mess left behind by death.
Think of something warm and good. A miracle.
There was nothing in this part of town. Nothing but the dome. The cold dawn. And coiling around the buildings, the glass tube of the Superloop. Behind that, in the distance, the rocket-like façade of the Temple. Transparent, like the minds and bodies of Frome’s Citizens. Nowhere to go and find solace or shelter. Nowhere iRemember couldn’t see. It could probably see her now. She pulled up her collar, and hid deeper in her hood, trying to obscure her face. She let her hair drape.
She remembered feeling like Frome. Hormonal traces of her grandmother had seared themselves into her, pumping through the visor needles, as she watched those memories in Gurk’s cellar. For a second, the shock of seeing Frome’s thoughts had made Icara let her guard down. A little empathy had trickled in. It was different to surfing engrams of Off-Gridders. They were full of fight. And hope. Frome was, as it turned out, a hopeless shell. She no longer believed in iRemember. She no longer believed in anything. She had lost her way, her purpose, maybe even her mind, all to keep hold of power. It was a horrible weight, disappointment. She would never have dared believe her grandmother, that pneumatic engine of a woman, could feel like that.
Organ transplant number five. Which had been the most painful. Blaming it on the surgeon. The feeling of standing alone, everywhere she went. Surrounded by a tissue of fear. The feeling of waking up with a visor over her face, and a half-drunk bottle of Bureau Bourbon spilling rivulets onto her chest. The only time since Fromemass that she had been able to fall asleep. She remembered feeling like a half-empty packet of Tranquelle. One pill left. iRemember usually didn’t do this to her. Most days it was easy to keep her distance. But not today. Today she was weak. Vulnerable. Like Frome, behind the bravado.
She was suddenly tired. As if she had lived her grandmother’s life. She was tired of the insurgents and the Lethene. She just wanted her visor. And her comfortable chair. The door locked. The jaw loosened. The visor came down. A packet of Tranquelle. One pill left.
Icara took a sad little drag of the Tranquelle vape.
Mother of Scientifically Proven God!
Maybe it was all going to be OK. Maybe it was still possible to save iRemember. All the misery was just Tranquelle cold turkey. She had heard rumours that Tranquelle withdrawal could result in a slow and painful death by reality. Sure enough, one little vape and just as she was losing hope, out of the morning drizzle, in a puff of fairy-tale pink, shining like a beacon, she saw the tall tower of The Glitz. The City’s number-one eight-star hotel. Three extra stars had been added, because Frome was a regular diner. Stars like red flares in the desert. For inside the Glitz’ ivory tower was the only real friend Icara had ever had in the world. If they were still friends, that is. Because Icara hadn’t seen her since the thing. Which she didn’t want to name, much less remember.
There was nowhere else to go.
***
Frome had spent another evening in the blissful embrace of iRemember. She had a glorious collection of memories, which she was savouring, like expensive wine. Incapacitated, she lolled in her Chesterfield with a thin line of drool slithering down her chin.
It hadn’t always been this way.
When Frome first entered the service, she had pep, vim, ambition. With a side serving of vigour. She used to be able to allow other people’s thoughts and feelings to glide over her own ever so gently. Never letting the empathy take hold. Never really feeling like another person. But this had taken a lot of self-control. And Frome was much, much older
than she looked. The best Sub-Urban plastic surgeon had worked his magic. She had already been well past forty when she had used Malcolm as a bungee cord out of the Sub-Urbs. She’d looked twenty years younger. Now, decades later, certainly well over ninety and probably more than a century old (the official records couldn’t seem to decide which and Frome could no longer remember), the reasons for needing to rule and control had become fuzzy, like candy-floss.
She could feel her empire eroding. But when she let the fizz of artificial hormones flow through her she stopped caring so much. It was so good to forget herself in other people’s perfectly preserved lives. Good memories. Like pickled specimens in jars. But even bad memories – maybe even especially bad memories – were sugar-coated sweets to her. She could live them for hours, with an intravenous drip of Bureau Bourbon poking out from the grey fluff of her suit.
These were beautiful, golden evenings. She would wake from them briefly, and feel she had lived her life over again. There was nothing achy about the regrets of other people. It was sweet to experience them, taste them for a second, those regrets. Knowing that they were not yours. But feeling them anyway.
Why didn’t I tell him? I wish I had told him. Now I’m sitting here, feeling like a phoney. A liar. A cheat.
She rolled the regret from ear to ear, in the flashing spaces between the synapses, like sucking on a toffee candy, letting the sweetness dissolve out and fill her head. A ballet of other people’s feelings. This was far better than any drug. Better than any Lethene the Off-Gridders could cook up in their tunnels. Better than anything grown in the huge fields of the Tranquelle Belt in the hot, poisonous smoke. Stronger. More powerful. And infinitely sweeter. It had none of the false strawberry aftertaste of a manufactured pleasure.
iRemember Page 18