Sometimes, as she lay with her head flung back and the visor pulled down to her ear-lobes, the faint snap and crackle of memory fizzing at her temples, she wondered if all this sweetness would eventually rot her brain out. Like really bad tooth decay. Fatal, maybe.
But the soft, sweet treacle fizz was irresistible. And she found herself drawn to it again. Night after night.
She was a collector, a connoisseur.
She remembered the first time she had tried watching the memories. Malcolm Drawbridge had gone home to his first wife and had accidentally left a tablet with some iRemember files in the Sub-Urban room he shared with Frome. It could have been a scandal. Should have been. But Frome didn’t tell.
To a Sub-Urban woman, the tech was a miracle. The black half-visor for remote working. The static crackle. iRemember was in its infancy. She could still recall that memory now and it would make her smile. A terrible recording. No sound, no emotion. Just the bare bones. The visuals of the scene. There had been incredible advances in the field of mnemonics since then. Some of those her own doing. But there had been a special charm to those early, silent engrams. Before she had progressed to what they came to call the Talkies – in an ironic nod to the cinema, because of course these recordings were nothing short of miraculous compared to dated old digital video; they were pure, unadulterated brain-data for goodness sake. Electric emotion.
She sought it out now, in the great iRemember web. A simple, old, silent memory.
A Government operative falling in love with the man she had been tasked with spying on. The moment that the love…blossomed, so to speak.
Possessing a memory. You added Tranquelle, and it was like holding the molten core of another person.
A loud beeping noise tore through the virtual fabric of the Bioware.
A message.
Insurgents. More insurgents. Three foiled assassination attempts. She had removed the visor for this?!
Ah...a message from Nobody.
This had better be good. It would have to be to justify tearing herself away from the golden world in the Bioware.
***
The lobby whummed like an enormous marble freezer. It was the thrum of lazy money, and power. All black and gold paint and strategically placed orchids. A chandelier hung, bearing ripe pears of glass. Every surface was cold and dry. The lights and glitter, along with some truly operatic air-conditioning, covered up the drip of incessant rain from the misters which threatened to make even the City’s most opulent building sound like a lean-to with a corrugated roof.
The servers and old-fashioned bell boys milled around the lobby, less for service and more for ambiance. The Glitz was proud of its nostalgic ambiance. At that moment the bell boys were ignoring a small woman in a black tracksuit soiled by the Sub-Urbs, with dirty fingers, a possibly contagious cough, and a missing shoe. A Belter tourist probably, they thought, with that tacky plastic Keep-safe around her neck.
‘Madame,’ said the concierge with almost imperceptible sarcasm that stung Icara anyway, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but the manager has asked not to be disturbed.’
Luckily the manager had overheard the conversation and emerged from behind a partition, sweating from the heat of the kitchen. The hotel business was hard work. Gretna looked like she had run a half-marathon. Her hands were covered in marks sustained from heavy lifting.
Maybe it was Icara’s diminished, dirty state that saved her from a certain punch in the face from her old schoolfriend.
She didn’t say what she should have said which was, ‘Gret...I screwed up...can you ever forgive me?’
Or even: ‘Forgive me. It’s been ages, and I’ve been a terrible friend.’
Instead there was a long, awkward silence that almost reduced the Government Inspector to tears. Followed by mumbling.
‘I...I’m in trouble. Well...at least I think I’m in trouble. Can we go somewhere private and talk? I need your help.’
Icara’s voice cracked. She flinched as she saw Gretna move towards her. She was expecting, well, anything, but a Gretna bear hug.
A hug which Icara Swansong definitely did not deserve.
***
It had happened like this. And it was one of Icara’s worst memories, and something she had confessed during the Purification Ceremony, the confessional that all recruits had to undergo before graduating from the Academy, prior to taking up their Bureau posts. They called it the Download Moment. The storing of the memories of minors was not allowed in establishments like the Academy. Only the children of the Belt were observed wholesale.
‘Bless me, Brother, for I have had a Bad Memory.’
‘Repent, Child Swansong, and you shall be free.’
‘...’
It was hard, repentance. Owning up. She almost didn’t do it. She almost told a lie, there and then. Even though she knew the Confessor could see the Bad Memory in his visor, feel it, as if it were his own. He was poised to press a button. It could be green or red. And it could mean the beginning or the end of a career.
Icara was only seventeen. She did not know the depths of the terrible memories that had been spoken in this little walnut cabinet and played out in reflections and pulses across the retinal screen of the Brethren charged with watching them.
She also didn’t know how much the Brother was enjoying this moment. Confessors were the only Brethren allowed to touch tech. And the Brother was making the most of it behind the walnut door.
‘I...’
He can see what happened, Icara. Just articulate it and you will be saved. It will live on in the collective consciousness. And you will be able to continue living the good life, making good memories.
‘The final examination. Gretna did it.’
‘What did Gretna do Child Swansong?’
‘The final examination. The work wasn’t mine. It was Gretna’s. I swapped the papers, because I was too faint with anxiety to write anything. And now Gretna has been kicked out of the Academy because they thought the empty paper was hers. She knows I did it. I will never forget the look on her face as she packed up in the dorm room. Like she felt sorry for me.’
‘Why did you do it, my child?’
‘Because I know I’m going to be the better Inspector. I did it for the good of the Bureau.’
‘You are now clean. Child Swansong. The City remembers.’
‘The City remembers,’ she remembered chanting back, on the edge of tears. Relief. Guilt. It was impossible to say.
She heard the faint bleep.
A fist loosened its grip on her intestines. She could breathe again.
She would be graduating with the rest of the cohort.
They’d only told Icara that Gretna would be kicked out. In fact, Gretna was going through the Download Moment at the same time. But Gretna refused to tell the Brethren about what she knew. Refused to betray Icara. Gretna had not learned the most important lesson. That loyalty to friends came second to loyalty to iRemember. She would not be graduating at all.
***
Chatter and noise. A city chewing.
They got out of Gretna’s beaten-up transit pod and began a slow, silent walk to Gretna’s flat. They had hardly spoken in the pod. The memory of Icara’s betrayal hung between them. An unpleasant thought, like rotting meat. The pod had whirred through the air above the Service District, finally settling in one of its streets. A street that looked like all the others. This was the part of the City that no one wanted to visit. It was the part that Frome occasionally canvassed in when it was time for voting season, but left pretty quickly before the sun went down. It housed the Service economy, all the cooks and cleaners that serviced the Bureau and the Temple. The buildings were full of identical square rooms, small, windowless and cheap.
Gretna opened the heavy fire door into her room with a key-card. Old technology. Everything about the place was a little
out of date. Tarnished. Icara looked around the single room, with no windows, only an LED screen masquerading as a sunny sky. It was poky, a little dirty and smelled of onions. What furniture there was, was faded and rickety. Icara felt a wave of claustrophobia. She had pushed Gretna into this tiny room, and turned the key. Imprisoned her in the hotel business, when all Gretna had wanted to do was work for the Bureau.
She must be angry. But she’s not showing it. Is there something behind the eyes? Childhood hatred in green?
Icara watched her friend. Still waiting for the cold shoulder. Waiting to be told to get out.
It had been a long decade. Gretna had grown older. And a lot bulkier and plumper. The ochre head of a desert lizard licked a forked tongue along an elbow dimple. There were other tattoos too. And dermal implants. But the lizard was one Icara remembered from the Academy. Icara watched Gretna pull a fat cigar from her pocket and light it. It was against the fire regulations set out in the Code. Gretna had never had time for Codes.
Gretna Greene. Her forearms a cave of Lascaux in human skin. Real cigars were rare and hard to find these days, but Gretna had procured herself a procurer. A home-grower living on the edge of the Belt, beyond the industrial fields where they were nursing little pink pills like shrimp under protective plastic. Her room was covered in posters of heavy metal bands. Painted faces under thrashing hair. Huge guitars. Eyeliner. There was a fish tank in one corner, with a baby shark in it. Contraband. And more than this. Under the smell of onions was a smell Icara remembered from Gurk’s pigeon shop. Weapons. And that tang. That could only be Lethene.
Still, she couldn’t quite allow herself to relax.
They sat in silence. Icara didn’t know what to say. She wondered what Gretna was thinking. It was so strange and bitter-sweet to see her friend again, she almost forgot what had happened to her. There was no Lucian Ffogg. There was no Total Recall. No near miss on the Superloop stand. Papa G had never existed, and therefore had never been shot. There had been no bullet splatting like a fork into reconstituted protein mash. Only Gretna with piercings crawling along the ridges of her ears like ants, and the bright green, old-world rock-and-roll quiff above them.
Gretna was the first to break the silence. ‘I’m glad you came. It’s been a long time, sweedpea.’
Icara felt a prickling sensation along the back of her neck. It was too much kindness. What a horrible thing Icara had done. Her best friend’s dreams and future obliterated. For the sake of a place at the Bureau.
‘You look…The hotel business is treating you well…’
‘Thanks, sweedpea. I appreciate you lying. Really. But we both know I look like garbage after a long day working a job I’m too good to do. And you look like someone wants you dead. Now come on. You don’t seek out a friend you haven’t seen in ten years to talk about the hotel business. What’s the matter?’
Against her better judgement, and because there was no one else to tell, and because Icara had been missing a friend for about a decade, she decided to tell Gretna Greene everything.
‘Have you got a console in here?’ asked Icara.
She didn’t have to ask. Gretna had the look about her of someone who spent the small hours on the Shadow-web. There was probably more cracked tech here than there had been at Gurk’s.
‘More than a console, sweedpea.’
The words rolled. Heavy. Lascivious on Gretna’s tongue. That’s part of what Icara had always loved about her. She was sensual and dangerous. Everyone was Gretna’s sweedpea. Yet when you heard it, it made you feel as if you were the only one in the world.
‘But first, I think we need a little music. You look like you haven’t unwound since the Academy, sweedpea, and I have had a day of late deliveries that you literally wouldn’t believe.’
Gretna turned on the wireless. There were no cheery Tranquelle ditties here. Dark forms flitted across the screen of the wireless’ holo-link. Impossibly deep bass belted out, filling the room. The whale song of the Shadow-web. Muffled sounds of neighbours pounding on the walls and ceiling just made the bass sound louder.
Gretna offered Icara the cigar. Remembering their dorm nights at the Academy, Icara took it. Gingerly at first. There was almost nothing left to lose, but the Code had been drummed into her. The smell of burning was a forbidden taboo. As she breathed in, she realised she was beginning to relax. It was a strange feeling. Like opening a door.
‘She tried to kill me,’ Icara shouted over the thrumming bass.
‘Who tried to kill you, sweedpea?
‘Frome.’
‘Why’d she try to kill you, honey?’
Icara took off the Keep-safe, handling it with the reverence of a relic. She spoke the passwords, and it opened to reveal a cheap and ridiculous looking bit of plastic. If there had been a ray of sun in the room, it would have fallen on it. Instead, the fish tank cast its stagnant light.
‘Because of this.’
‘Because of a cheap bit of Belter tat? What is it? Pirated entertainment? Fergus stays at the Glitz you know. Maybe I can spit in his dinner for you.’
Icara managed a weak smile.
‘I wish, Gret,’ Icara coughed. The cigar was too strong. ‘I’ve got the Bad Memories of Frome’s entire Cabinet, and most of the Brethren besides. Not to mention Frome’s personal iRemember files. Lots of them. And let’s just say there’s not many happy memories among them.’
If Gretna was surprised, she didn’t show it. She looked deadpan.
‘How bad?’
‘Hard-reset bad. I wish I’d never seen it. It’s worse than anyone, even the Off-Gridders, could possibly imagine.’
‘Oh sweedpea. You really are in trouble.’
As if hearing someone else articulate it made it suddenly real for her, Icara let her head fall into her hands. She cradled it. The useless head. No job. On the run. Nobody. She had become a nobody. In the space of a few revolutions of the planet around the sun.
Then it was Gretna’s turn to talk. Icara’s learning curve was steep. Her friend had taken the scenic route to the hotel business. After the Academy, she’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. But from the perspective of Icara’s current predicament, that was actually the right crowd. The Service Industry was crawling with insurgents. The same crates that transported toffeed tarantula and other delicacies from the Glitz’ greenhouses transported Lethene.
‘You’re an Off-Gridder?’
‘Between hotel jobs, naturally. And that’s not what we call ourselves.’
She didn’t say what their own name for themselves was.
Gretna had had a patch fitted. From the same procurer who had procured that exceedingly long cigar.
‘A Lethene patch,’ Gretna explained.
It prevented recording of brain activity of any kind. Sweedpea would have to have a patch fitted too. Sweedpea was an enemy of the state now. And she would have to go Off-Grid.
Oh God. That would mean more tunnels. And the Belt. Or worse...the desert again. Couldn’t they talk about this? She was no enemy of the State. She had been a close personal friend, until this morning. Could we not continue to be at least on speaking terms?
The state was a giant. The energy-efficient dome like an enormous glowing breast, and under it a City full of people suckling. The body of the giant belonged in its entirety to Helena Frome. Icara was feeling too small to fight. She could feel the bass pounding in her chest. The contraband shark swam, looking bigger. Gnashing teeth.
‘Off-Grid, sweedpea. As far away from Frome as you can go. Where you can really be free,’ she mouthed. Icara was lip-reading now, the riffs were so loud.
The Bureau employee inside her told her ‘not so fast’. It begged her to think a little. It warned her against blind faith in long-lost friends. It told her that what was lost could not be regained. That that was a law of physics, or something. She ignored the voice. It was a voice th
at belonged to the Bureau and the Bureau had already betrayed her that day.
Gretna beckoned. Smiling through the cigar smoke. Waving a pickled scorpion, a speciality from Desert Ring 1, and a hundred other left-overs from the Glitz. Her fridge was full of the stuff. Icara ate like she hadn’t eaten for days.
There was also Belter beer. The kind they served in Sub-Urban night-boxes. A bright purple, sparkling liquid whose secret ingredient was agricultural run-off.
‘A toast to Gurk. He was the best leader the Off-Gridders never had. Long may he stay forgotten.’
Friendship was like Tranquelle. Better. Icara’s pupils dilated. It felt so good not to be alone.
***
Lucian was also not alone. It did not feel good.
In her lair full of screens and wireless technology, under an ominous and sickly green light, Emily Swansong was practising her cursive.
It was time.
She received a message from the mole that confirmed the Icara problem was no longer a problem. The message didn’t say how. But the memory stick was on its way. Emily would have it in just a few days.
It was plausible. Her little mole was doing good work. Icara was too trusting to avoid the mole’s clutches for long. She had always been a needy child. She would run straight into the arms of the Venus flytrap if the candy of understanding was waiting inside. Emily sucked air through her teeth. Human understanding. When would people learn that there was no such thing? There was only power or weakness.
Emily Swansong knew which side of that Frome dollar she stood on. She wrote gleefully, knowing she was rewriting her future. And the future of the entire State. The gentle scratching of fictions growing like lichen. The last spot of ink dried...
It could not be unwritten. What was on paper must remain.
A seemingly innocuous piece of paper. Which would change life forever.
Now she would have to put the rest of the plan into motion.
Her own false memories of the events that had taken place were nearly ready to be implanted into iRemember. She just had a few more tracking points to add. And then the mole could splice it into her file. It turned out those bastard children of Frome had their uses. When the Brethren pulled it up for evidence they would find a hard-working Emily Swansong, praying piously to Scientifically Proven God, and performing only tasks beneficial to the survival of the Bureau and the state. She scratched the thin scar on the back of her thigh, where the Lethene patch had been fitted. Dealing with the difficult capture of seasoned criminal Lucian Ffogg and the harrowing reality of her own daughter turning against the Bureau and living as a dangerous insurgent. And of course the mercy of not Forgetting this daughter, but rather allowing her to live the rest of her life out in piety among the Brethren. That’s the part she would be adding today. There would be a lot of tracking points required. Those red plastic flowers. As long as she made sure to place them in carefully obscured areas, like on restaurant tables, in fields in the distance and in the backgrounds of advertising billboards, not even the Brethren High Court would notice them. The perfectly fabricated myth would become reality.
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