iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  ‘I have always loved children. And now I have a hundred. I hereby declare this home for the neglected progeny of the Sub-Urbs open. In honour of Scientifically Proven God and iRemember, I welcome you to the nursery of piety that is the Children of Frome.’

  Helena Frome, Speeches, Later Years

  After Emily, but just before the hopeless feeling of disappointment consumed her, Frome developed a taste for saviouring. She set up a home for Sub-Urban orphans in the Temple cloisters. The top ranks of the Brethren were always occupied by the children of powerful Citizens. She didn’t want to rock the boat too much, so divinity still ran in families. But the orphans provided the Temple with their rank-and-file Brethren. It was a nice idea. However, Frome found that, like all things, nice fades with age.

  The Cloisters had become a hard and inhospitable place. Still, they were better than the Sub-Urbs. The Children of Frome lived in fear, but at least they lived.

  It was in these cloisters, in a glass cell in the top floors of the Temple, that Sister Greene discovered her love of tech, as she sat deep in philosophical contemplation.

  Gretna was a novice. And while it was true that she loved the Great Rustle, it was also true that she frequently found herself prey to doubt. What was so bad about the Digital, after all? Wasn’t it the very thing that powered the City? Didn’t the Confessors use it sometimes? iRemember? Without it, what would the Brethren do? She knew that doubt was something experienced by all the Brethren, and the Sister, at one time or another. Usually prayer-time took care of any niggles.

  But Gretna had more than a niggle. She had a stack of Gizmo magazines that reached to her knee. They were hidden under her bed. She had found them in a long-forgotten part of the library. They were from a distant era. But to her, the old tech was new. She was obsessed with digital archiving, microchips, motherboards, wiring. These were obsessions it would take more than two giant sheets of paper to rustle into nonexistence.

  She knew that this obsession was wrong. So, to put an end to it, she spent every night down in the archives, reading up on the evils of artificial intelligence – books with titles like When Good Records Go Bad – and so forth. The attempts to become more like her Brothers had the opposite effect. She would emerge from the archives in a diaphanous film of sweat. Desperate for the latest tech implant. Dreaming of motherboards. The sound that servers make. A forbidden sound that she was not supposed to know. She was never supposed to have heard it.

  One night she decided that she had had enough. She no longer had the strength to fake it.

  She had to tell someone.

  The Sister already knew. She had been watching Gretna’s growing proficiency for tech with interest. Gretna wasn’t made for the Brotherhood and the Temple. But she could put her special abilities with tech to good use in the Bureau.

  With special dispensation from the Temple, Gretna enrolled into the Academy. Frome’s scholarship programme was born. Gretna loved iRemember. She loved surfing the engrams. They made sense to her in a way that paper never could. The possibility of becoming a Bureaucrat was supposed to be a life-line. But Scientifically Proven God had other plans for Gretna. Tech, and its magnetic pull, had begun to pull her in another direction.

  Even before she met Icara, Gretna already knew that the Bureau, such as it was, was not for her. She knew Icara had cheated. Swapped the names on the exam paper. It would have been a capital offence if Icara hadn’t been a minor. What was written must never be unwritten. Gretna didn’t care. It took more than a bit of soft betrayal to hurt a Child of Frome. People had been betraying her all her life. But, she had finally found something that wouldn’t.

  It was during a basic training task at the Academy that Gretna stumbled upon the Shadow-web. A beckoning hand in the background of an engram. Placed there by the Off-Gridders for the curious, whose natural inclination was to explore. A secret door into a world so complex and interesting it made iRemember look like a stagnant pool of zeros and ones. Gretna wanted to surf bigger waves. The Shadow-web was full of them. Endless possibility. And, in the dark, no one cared who you had been or asked what you would become. It was all flesh, swimming in the void. When she found the world of the Shadow-web, the Off-Gridder tunnels full of cracked tech and engrammers who could play with the folds of the mind like clay, she finally felt like a protagonist. She was better than any of them. The best. A self in her own right. She had come home. Off-Grid.

  The Off-Gridders would have wild, orgiastic parties – or at least that’s what Bureau people were told and what they imagined, when they thought about them. And envied them. Which they did often. But in between the parties they were not having, those kids were really doing something far more insidious and dangerous than the odd orgy. They were playing with rodent mnemonics and implanting Lethene, which they knew very well did exist, into mice. Very free-thinking mice. Mice who understood that, when you really came down to it, there is no maze. And in between philosophising with their mice and not having orgies, they were generally plotting the downfall of the Bureau.

  Still, despite the Shadow-web activity, Gretna Greene remained one of Frome’s children. It wasn’t something you could just shake off. Helena Frome was watching over her. And she was not concerned about her prodigal daughter. She knew how to put even prodigal children to good use. Gretna would, over the years, make herself very useful to avoid going back to the Brethren. Very useful indeed.

  ***

  Home is where the heart is. And Icara’s heart had stopped briefly. It took four paddles to restart it again. That wasn’t unusual when fitting a Lethene patch. She woke up with a jolt, eyes wide with terror, adrenalin tearing through her like a Loop pod at rush-hour. She had been bundled into a foul-smelling un-marked Glitz delivery pod that reeked of rotten meat. It went whirring and bobbing through the back streets, making its way out into Desert Ring 1.

  In the back of the pod, Gretna’s Off-Grid cronies gave her something for the pain. Pain was the wrong word for it. It was explosive. The Lethene patch – the disgusting, digital Bot larva of freedom – wriggled subcutaneously. It was going to leave a scar. And possibly some serious tetanus. Icara watched the slithering monstrosity under her dermis with interest at first. In the daze of Lethene-derived sedatives she could watch herself as a stranger would. But the longer she watched the more disgusting it became. She clawed at her arm and screamed uncontrollably.

  One of the hooded people who had accompanied Icara on the pod-ride bent over her. An arm covered in wearable tech. A needle point. A firework of analgesic and a sedative. The Government Inspector slept.

  The dreams came.

  She was flying on a huge purple pig with the head of Helena Frome, over a dark sea in which she could see reflected the metal stars on the façade of the Glitz. Only the Glitz wasn’t there. She saw Death. And Scientifically Proven God. And some things she didn’t even know she believed in, which had never been scientifically proven. Enormous, angry, wrinkled Mother Nature – a kinetic desert, a sky full of stars.

  Then she saw nothing. Until a last contented wriggle of the patch finding its nesting place deep in the tissues near the nape of her neck woke her up.

  A relief indeed to see Gretna’s smiling, tattooed face.

  She had no idea how far from the City they were. They might have been on another planet. She was in some kind of underground concrete cavern, an enormous cavity that could fit the Temple inside it three times over. It was an oddly puckered hole, like the centre of a synapse. Small tunnel mouths could be seen around its circumference. One large tunnel, the main entrance, curled off into the darkness on the southern side. It was through this large mouth that Icara had been carried. Swallowed by the Off-Grid whale and now deep inside its belly. The collected body heat of a thousand Off-Gridders pulsed, and rivulets of condensation streaked the walls. Where were they? Off-Gridder cells tended to be small and disorganised, shaped like networks of synapses. Mimicking iR
emember. The cavern was large and well-hewn. It would have taken centuries to dig it up with Off-Gridder hand-tools, no matter how resourceful they were. They must have taken control of a pre-existing place. Using the City against itself. Some kind of disused Government facility? Under the Tranquelle Belt? Perhaps even around or near the City. It was odd to think of it still standing up there, above their heads. Full of normal Citizens. Eating dinner. Brushing their teeth. Popping their Tranquelle. Judging by the rock type, they were probably in the desert. Under Desert Ring 1, maybe?

  There were no welcomes.

  Off-Gridders didn’t really speak much at all.

  They did smoke a lot of cigars, and trade firearms and Lethene.

  She’d always wondered how they’d survived, the insurgents. In snatches of conversation with Gretna, she learned how they managed out in the dusty desert nightmare. There was food if you knew where to look. They’d even found a way to collect water. What little there was in the desert. Not a lot. But enough. Lethene had a number of surprising uses. It worked especially well as a condenser. Gretna got one of the Off-Gridders to explain how they had designed Lethene sheets they laid out on the sand at night. As the temperature of the air dropped, the vapour naturally present in the air cooled and condensed. Drops of dew. The meagre film filtered through the Lethene membrane and into pipes, which wound deeper and deeper down into the tunnels. The water was stored in big plastic barrels near the tunnel entrances. They were guarded by armed guards. There was usually just enough to go around.

  OK, so I might not die of thirst. That’s something, at least.

  But as the hours wore on, and the Lethene patch made her feel sicker, Icara felt that survival might not be all it was cracked up to be.

  There was mess and chaos everywhere she looked. People in every corner. Watching your every move. Not bothering to hide their surveillance, like iRemember. There were stalls selling dead things, animal hide, survival kits, water purifiers, scavenged plastic. She couldn’t tell who was stealing from the stalls, who was running them, and who was a paying customer.

  The currency was still Frome dollars. It was odd to see her grandmother’s cracked, plastic face exchanged for cracked tech and illegal cigars.

  This is like going back to some prehistoric time. A thousand miles away from offices and novelty calendars.

  The floor of the cavity was a quicksand of heaving bodies. In the constant twilight of the tunnels, time was marked by a single recording of a desert day, playing on a tarp that the Off-Gridders had suspended from the ceiling as a makeshift screen.

  The Off-Grid life was and wasn’t the way she’d learned it was. There were cells of insurgents who set fire to things, and then there were the Pacifists. Gretna told her they made up the bulk of the Off-Gridders. For the Pacifists, the overarching plan was simple. And it was all about numbers. Basic arithmetic. Get enough people patched. Adding numbers to the body of resistance until it was big enough to stand up to the body of Frome’s Government. Just stand. There would be no need to fight. The Pacifists were recruiting well. There seemed to be new members daily, still showing signs of Tranquelle withdrawal. Though the Lethene meant they could survive the breaking waves of too much reality, these new recruits were vulnerable. They had been through a lot. Many of them were Belters, who had seen the dark side of the Bureau first-hand. Some had lost everything at the hands of prospectors and miners and then been told that what they had had never existed. The prospectors’ Bad Memories had been relegated to some Lethene-coated server. Maybe even Hangar 3 in Lot 458. Memories of their ordeals would wake them up in the night. But the real danger lay in the Lethene patches. Even if the patch took, there was still the risk of infection. Weeping wounds festered. Icara recognised a mousy girl with glasses she had occasionally seen in Memorial Park. A Rank 2. She made it two hours before the fever took her. Burned up from the inside, like leaves on an illegal bonfire.

  Too much freedom, thought Icara.

  She had to keep reminding herself why she was here. Still in too much pain from the Lethene patch to take any particular note of the hooded Off-Gridder faces around her, she was at least thinking clearly enough to keep out of trouble. She understood that she wouldn’t be leaving here with a soulmate, so she tried not to speak to anyone unless she really had to. Some of the faceless mass was armed. The threat of violence. Rarer here than in the Sub-Urbs, but more serious when it threatened you. When it did, it was violence with a PhD.

  As the Lethene-patch fever simmered through Icara, she slowly fell into a waking dream state. A limbo. Purgatory. Purging the State from her head. Staring up at the artificial desert sky, half-awake and half in a sedative-induced fever dream, Icara saw herself in Desert Ring 2 with her mother. She found she couldn’t quite recall her face. It had been a long time since she had seen it. She watched the meeting, half in her mind, half on the screen. And then the image of her mother, half-remembered, burst into flame. The burning server from Lot 458. She remembered Lucian Ffogg. Looking up at the false stars suspended above her, she could see why he’d loved it. The vastness was comforting. The deserts were where the world drew breath.

  A pervasive smell of marinated pigeon and re-fried protein dumplings woke her. Gurk. Icara felt bile rise in her throat at the thought of Papa G. Cold by now. In the hands of Scientifically Proven God. Despite the fact he was scientifically proven, Icara was finding it harder and harder to believe in a great protector. If he really was up there, he was doing a terrible job of protecting. Or maybe he just hated Bureaucrats.

  ‘You’ve always got a friend in iRemember.’

  Helena Frome, The Apocryphal Dinnner Conversations

  Days passed quickly in the Off-Gridder world. The community in the tunnels was a mirror image of the City. A kooky friend, wearing a tin-foil hat. And Icara was changing by association, hour by hour.

  ‘You’re among friends here, sweedpea. You’re an Off-Gridder now. Swimming in oblivion. No-one’s watching. Let your hair down. Learn to unwind! Rules don’t count for much down here.’

  Warm marshmallow feeling. Then a knot. Can I really do this? Isn’t change the same as death?

  All of her training had been aimed at apprehending and neutralising them. Now she walked past them on the way to the communal toilets. Groups of Off-Gridders clustered around hacked hardware, sewing Lethene sheets.

  She joined them in the sewing, just to have something to do. Soon she was sewing faster than the others. She still thought of the Bureau a lot. Though she tried not to, there wasn’t much else to do. She started off recalling how hard she had worked for it. Within her first six months, she had improved the efficiency of her section by twenty per cent.

  Icara had joined the Bureau at a moment of change. The old guard had been made up of tough Belt-hardened Bureaucrats. Some still remembered the Bureau under Drawbridge and behaved as if nothing had changed. They worked hard, but also spent whole weekends in night-boxes in the Sub-Urbs and came back with bruises over more than their temples. They drank heavily. They weren’t bad people exactly. But they weren’t clean either. They had a kind of honour-code system among themselves. And most of the time they upheld the Codes and rules of iRemember.

  But their approach to the rule of law was...creative. Their work for the Bureau was good work, but they were good at sniffing out Bad Memories because it takes one to know one. Many of them would have ended up Forgotten themselves if it hadn’t been for the Bureau and Drawbridge. They couldn’t surf an engram eddy. It would kill them. And they were so sensitive to Tranquelle that it almost rendered them useless when it was introduced.

  Under Frome the process of replacing these old operatives with new blood from the Academy and the Scholarship programme for the Children of Frome had begun. New Blood like Icara. And Gretna. With complete iRemember records, high Academy Scores, and higher typing-speeds. But the old ways were tough to kill. They had been hardened by Sub-Urban booze and pro
fligate living. Even after years working as a Rank 4, Icara still noticed the laxness and over-reliance on deceit that characterised the older investigative teams in the Bureau. She personally witnessed several local area operatives taking bribes for negotiating laxer sentences with the Brethren or letting Off-Gridders go free and escape questioning for payment in contraband goods, like desert mangoes, a kind of sand-dwelling lizard-fish.

  How could Bureaucrats who spent their weekends in the Sub-Urbs with the likes of Ronnie Spoon come back to the City on Monday mornings and work towards pulling the rug from under Ronnie’s feet? She promised herself that when she became a senior operative, her section would take no bribes. She vowed to herself that she would never again lie to get what she wanted. She would simply be the best. No matter what it took.

  It took a lot. She spent mornings in the gym, days at work and evenings researching Bureau history, learning the Codes and Codices off by heart. She internalised maps of the Sub-Urbs. Let the other Bureaucrats socialise. The only time she had allowed herself to relax was at the last Fromemass office party. Even that was planned. She had learned in a study she had recently read that people who allowed themselves to relax thirty per cent of the time, performed thirty per cent more efficiently seventy per cent of the time, which could increase the productivity of their sections by an average of five per cent.