iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  Of course, she had let herself get too carried away. It is difficult to mathematically calculate the correct percentage of letting your hair down. And there had been a little too much green punch with Government-logo ice-cubes floating in it.

  Despite a raging headache she had worked overtime for the next three weeks, adding to her Ronnie board. The board had been just a sketch then, but already the connections between central Bureau operatives and Sub-Urban businessmen, like Ronnie, were beginning to show.

  And there was that great big question mark. How did people like Ronnie get away each time? How did all the Off-Gridders get away with it. Arson, and sabotage? With the Bureau camera fastened permanently inside their heads? Eventually this map was what had made Little Brother ask her to join him in his crusade against corruption.

  Sure, the question mark was Lethene. Just as Gurk had said, though she hadn’t really believed him. Behind the question mark. The same thing that was behind everything else in the City. The Bureau itself. Helena Frome.

  Her grandmother must have wanted the Sub-Urbs to continue being a grey zone. Criminal activity is still business. With huge revenues that could benefit the iRemember empire.

  And what an empire. Despite all that had happened to her, Icara had to admit she still missed it. The old life. Especially at night.

  No Dreammakers here. Even after days, she couldn’t sleep. Instead she yearned for that feeling of purpose back. When things had still been relatively simple. You see an Off-Gridder? Disarm. Imprison. Find its nest and root it out. Good and evil clearly demarcated, and largely dependent on whether or not the person was wearing the latest House of Frome fashions and had been stamped with the logo, the Government seal of approval. She longed for that time when she had felt squeaky clean. Pious. An asset to Scientifically Proven God. And more importantly, the Bureau.

  They are everything I’m not. Everything I’ve stood against for years.

  The line between good and bad had become a rotating Frome dollar, suspended in mid-air. Where would her dollar land? Would it land at all? Who was she? Was she really one of the good guys?

  Hadn’t she stomped all over Gretna’s dreams of Bureau greatness? Stabbed her between the shoulder blades with a knife made of Bioware? Icara was sure it still hurt. Yet Gretna had taken her back. Given her a place to stay. Each time she thought of it, she felt a heavy shame. The tunnels were full of it. A shame so palpable Icara was sure people could see it. It walked behind her, like a skulking twin. It babbled and howled. Guilty!

  With the Lethene patch spreading its thin blue tendrils through her system, all the old Tranquelle-induced bliss was burning up. Dew on a Lethene sheet at dawn. And her time Off-Grid had made her view of her own self transform. Roach-like. And skulk away.

  She used to think she was efficient and ambitious. Now she saw she had been power-hungry. Desperate for success. And approval. From someone. From anyone, but especially from Frome. To be as good as her absentee mother, whose early exploits and years as a career Bureaucrat had turned her into something of a legend.

  She told herself she had been working for the good of the City and its Citizens. Really, she had been working so that someone would say: ‘You’re not all bad, Miss Swansong. Well done.’ It was a vain hope. No one had said the words ‘Well done’ in a Bureau building since 10 B.F. (Before Frome). She had been all ego. Kidding herself it was all for the good of the Citizens. She’d always only been working for herself.

  Underground, at every mealtime, she kept her eyes down and remembered the feeling outside Magrat’s surgery. The feeling that she was a double. That everyone was. Two-faced people in a two-faced empire. Ronnie Spoon. Criminal. Philanthropist. Lucian Ffogg. Perpetrator. Victim. Icara Swansong. Bureau royalty. Off-Gridder scum.

  On the sixth night, though the fever from the Lethene patch had subsided, Icara was still too stifled in the wet-sock warmth of the cavern to sleep. She walked aimlessly between the few market stalls that remained open. Sad, small little pleasures. Waterless soap in a can. Rock candy. Which was a sugar-coated rock that you spat out when you were done with it, and hoped you still had all your teeth. And pornographic novelty plastic calendars that would have earned a Citizen at least three nights in the Temple. All these seemed to be particularly popular with the Off-Gridders.

  Gretna had given her a few Frome dollars for emergencies. Six of them precisely. She pulled one out. A particularly yellowed counter. She flicked it up into the air and caught it. Both sides, her grandmother’s grinning face. She bought herself a spiced fizzy drink in a can. An energy drink called Beve-Rage. It had an after-taste that reminded her of vomit. But just sitting somewhere and drinking something from a can helped her feel less like she was accidentally living someone else’s life. The wrong life.

  If I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m walking through the Carnival District on the Mardi Frome, watching the digital pyrotechnics on the façades of the buildings. Feeling cool rain on my face.

  The cumulative effect of the drink was truly disgusting. It broke through the reverie in a nauseating wave and returned Icara to her dun-coloured present. Happiness only replaced indigestion when she saw Gretna coming towards her from one of the smaller tunnel mouths. She must be back from a shift at the Glitz.

  Gretna smelled a little of Disinfect and a smell Icara didn’t recognise. A cold, hard smell. And it didn’t suit Gretna Greene one bit. Not the Gretna Icara had known. But the news she brought with her pushed the thought to the back of Icara’s mind.

  Gretna was sorry she had been away longer than planned. She’d had to take care of something. They’d received some bad news. Magrat Smog, one of the last doctors in the Sub-Urbs not shut down by the Bureau for treating Off-Gridders, had been found dead. Her throat cut from ear to ear. In the ancient, dark-age ruins of what had been a paper mill. Near the end of the postal railway line.

  A sting in the pit of Icara’s stomach. Magrat must have been killed on her way back from Gurk’s.

  ‘You OK, sweedpea?’

  No. She wasn’t. But she listened while Gretna kept talking. They’d found something odd near the body. An unusual stud. A small implant of wearable tech. Maybe it wasn’t the Bureau at all, but a tech junkie. Sometimes they got desperate.

  Icara remembered Magrat. Magrat hadn’t had any visible tech. And nothing worth stealing. But even though she knew Gretna was lying to make her feel better, it almost worked. Almost.

  First Lucian, then Gurk, now Magrat. Enough was enough.

  ‘Gretna. I’ve been thinking. I shouldn’t stay here. I’m too close to Frome. Dangerously close. I’m sorry I ever asked for your help. I was desperate, but I should have known better than to come to you. As long as I’m around, you won’t be safe.’

  Gretna smiled.

  ‘We’re Off-Gridders, sweedpea. We’re used to it.’

  How must Gretna feel? Running for years, from dawn raids, evening raids and raids after Frome’s afternoon nap. Always hiding.

  ‘I’m truly sorry. For all of it. And especially for the Academy. For jeopardising your place at the Bureau…’ It was the hardest sentence she ever spoke.

  ‘Sweedpea! Stop saying sorry. It’s such a useless word! Besides, I could get offended by your sympathy. Do I look like someone to feel sorry for? Look at me! I’m running the Glitz and sticking it to the Government one Bureaucrat at a time. You did me a favour, sugar. When you betrayed me. A place that can turn a friend against you can’t be trusted. Now listen. I haven’t been completely honest with you.’

  Hadn’t she just thought it? Always hiding. Icara stiffened. In her paranoia, she suddenly saw Gretna’s face turn into the face of Ronnie Spoon. On her board. Laughing at her.

  ‘I’ve been doing some investigation of my own. And I think we might have found something that could lead us to your missing friend Mr Ffogg.’

  The vice around Icara’s chest loosened.
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  ‘I spoke to a used pod dealer in Sector Z, and he said that he’d heard on the Lethene River that someone had dumped something big and heavy in the same paper mill Magrat died in. I had a look around. And I found this. Maybe you’ll know what it is.’

  Gretna pulled a metal shard from her pocket. It was a registration tag. With the Government hourglass embossed on it. And a number.

  ‘The plane that took Lucian. I’d remember it even if the thought was a thousand years out of Bioware,’ said Icara. Her own voice sounded strange as she said it. Looking at the piece of dented metal all she could see was the body of Lucian on the floor of Hangar 3. She blinked the memory away, but it remained. A holo-link with the past.

  ‘If Frome wants you gone, there’s not much you can do about it,’ she said. ‘What’s the good of even looking? Lucian’s probably been dead for days. It’s over. You might as well throw that bit of Bureau junk away.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you about Magrat.’

  There was a heavy silence. Magrat Smog. Long may she stay forgotten.

  Gretna looked as if she was holding something back. She seemed to be wrestling a thought. Eventually, she continued: ‘What makes you think it’s Frome?’

  ‘Are you serious? My name came up on the screens, Gret. Remember? And Lucian’s. It has to be Frome. No one else could have enough access to bulldoze Mem-Convict like that. The whole thing reeks of grandmother.’

  They both knew what it meant to be up on the screen. A fate worse than death.

  ‘Still, I’m not sure. You said Frome fired you because the clean-up team weren’t a government sanctioned clean-up team. If all those memories hanging around your neck are real, then I can believe that she wanted to blow up Lot 458, but maybe she was telling the truth about the plane. You’ve gone Off-Grid now. Why bother to stash the plane in the Sub-Urbs? Wouldn’t she just have it dismembered somewhere in the Belt or even left in her own hangars? She must have known that you couldn’t snoop around. Not after the screens, not with a price on your head.’

  ‘She must have had her reasons, that’s all I know. How could you think there’s someone else? Someone capable of scheming against my grandmother in a world where only she holds the keys to all our heads?’

  Two-faced people in a two-faced City.

  Gretna Greene. Ronnie Spoon. Gretna was protecting her grandmother for some reason. Was there a hardness in Gretna’s face she hadn’t seen? Hadn’t dared to see? Hadn’t wanted to. It was a horrible thought. It couldn’t be true. But what if it was true? Why? Why was she protecting Frome? Out loud, as if in response to her hallucination of Ronnie Spoon, she said, ‘It’s impossible. I think you’ve had too much Belter beer,’ she added. ‘There’s no one else. Frome’s at the bottom of it all.’

  ‘I’ll look into it anyway,’ said Gretna. ‘I’ll be back later. Try and get some shut-eye, sweedpea. You’ll feel better about the whole thing in the morning.’

  Icara looked around her at the perpetual twilight, and the sky made of rocks. Everything might be better in the morning. But in these tunnels, morning never really came. She walked around aimlessly for what seemed like hours, Gurk’s memory stick hanging heavy against her chest. An ugly necklace of uglier pasts, phosphorescing. She hoped she was wrong about Gretna. Close to what might have been morning, exhaustion overwhelmed her.

  ***

  The next day, Gretna took Icara for a walk around the Off-Gridder underground Tranquelle farm.

  ‘You’ve had a rough few days. I want to show you something. Something beautiful. To make you feel better.’

  An enormous garden of Tranquelle plants, their genetically modified stems reaching up towards the ceiling like angry, writhing fingers. They went on for hundreds of metres. An underground river. A thick, throbbing artery. Icara felt that she had entered a twisted hallucination. Pinkish purple pods hung like swollen bulbs from curling branches. The artificial blue lights were trained on the pods. Swelling. Purple fronds rustled above their heads.

  Beautiful it was not.

  Gretna was walking ahead, heaving the flexible stalks out of their way, forging a path and smiling.

  ‘Amazing, aren’t they? Can you believe you’re under a desert? Doesn’t it feel like you’re in some kind of forest? This is how you go properly Off-Grid,’ said Gretna. ‘Only way. Grow your own Tranquelle. Process it, and hey presto, sweedpea, you’ve got your very own Lethene source. I like to come down here on my own sometimes. It helps me clear my head.’

  ‘How did you manage to start a crop? I thought the seeds were Government property?’

  Icara corrected herself. I know they are. There’s a dossier in my office...there was a dossier...in what was once my office...which outlined exactly what to do in this situation. Seize the assets. Cut down the illegal Tranquelle plant. And I’m fighting the part of me that wants to do it. Maybe I don’t have to fight so hard.

  ‘Don’t tell me a Government Inspector hasn’t heard of the Shadow-web?’

  The stalks swish and sway, brushing the reflector lights. Shadows.

  The blue light was playing tricks. Gretna had her back turned for a second, picking a pod from one of the stalks. When she looked at her in this light, Icara saw something familiar in the shape of her shoulders. Could it have been Gretna in Memorial Park? Gretna who had lunged for her bag? She tried to push the thought away. The only person in the whole City, the whole world that had helped her, and here she was feeling suspicious. Still, Icara flinched involuntarily as Gretna turned in the grass, holding a pod like a grenade. Quickly. Subtly.

  Icara breathed in the thick, vanilla scent of the pod as Gretna broke it in half, exposing the nestled Tranquelle seeds. Just like the pills in the kiosks, only without the plastic wrap.

  They were beautiful.

  ‘This is the raw product. And through that door over there is our cook. He turns these little guys into Lethene.’

  A small door made of reclaimed plastic hung loosely on hinges that couldn’t take its weight. A saloon door in one of those novelty night-boxes in the Sub-Urbs.

  ‘Can we go in?’

  Gretna gave her an uncertain look. ‘Sure’, she said eventually, and let out a honey-soaked laugh. Like a shoulder-rub for the soul.

  The Tranquelle farm was like a beating heart. Disgusting and fascinating. Buried here where no one knew it existed. Life underground. A mirror image, she kept thinking. A mirror image of iRemember. The Shadow-web. The lights and the sounds made her feel like she was in a story book. The interactive iRemember environments the Bureau had installed in crèches for City children. She was four years old. This was the magical land of Nim, where the frightening Wizard, Memobad, had captured a friend. She and her fellow kindergarteners would have to rescue the toddler in distress. It was a way of building team-feeling. Icara had been good at the story books.

  It was a shame that real life wasn’t so easy.

  The production process was a jealously guarded secret. No one but Gretna, the cook, and one or two carefully vetted lieutenants had the key-code to the kitchen. The whole level was off-limits to the other Off-Gridders. She punched in the code. Icara watched and memorised. The Inspector in her couldn’t help it. Useful information. Saved for later.

  They entered a room full of UV light and a strange zinging heat. Icara heard Gretna give the call. One of the high-pitched animal whistles. For a second she was transported back to the day after the fire at Lot 458.

  A tech junkie emerged from the distended shadows. The face was tantalisingly familiar, but without iRemember to help her Icara couldn’t place him. His features, already enhanced by acres of tech, were distorted, chiselled down and then engorged by the glass containers which bubbled and sizzled on tripods. Titrating. Distilling oblivion.

  He seemed to travel down the tubes himself and emerged at the end of the concourse of beakers along with his Lethene.

 
‘Allow me to introduce Jinx Ende,’ said Gretna, as if she were reading the names of Cabinet members at a Glitz dinner party. ‘A brother from another mother. Or should I say the same mother. We were both Children of Frome. Jinx, allow me to introduce my Academy friend, Icara. We were like two sweedpeas in a pod for a while. Until she betrayed me,’ Gretna laughed. ‘Seriously now, she’s my dearest, oldest friend.’

  ‘Charmed I’m sure, to meet Bureau royalty,’ said Jinx, with a tone that might have been disapproving if it wasn’t slightly distorted by his tech-modified voice-box. ‘I hope Gretna’s trust isn’t misplaced, bringing Frome’s blood so deep into our…affairs.’

  Blood. Deep and guttural. It was true, she thought. She was Frome’s blood. Only Frome knew any different. To dispel the awkward silence that followed he added, ‘I suppose we’re all her progeny, of sorts. Welcome Off-Grid, Icara.’

  The awkwardness refused to go away. Distrust was written all over his face. All the implants in the world couldn’t disguise such strong feelings of distaste.

  The feeling is mutual, thought Icara. She especially didn’t like the way his junkie eyes kept flitting to the bulb that hung under her clothes. As if he could feel the presence of the Bioware. Of the tech. They hadn’t told anyone about the memory stick, but rumours about Icara abounded. That she was bugged. That she wasn’t just Frome’s granddaughter. That she was her clone. Somewhere in there must have been a rumour about the memory stick. The junkie looked like he knew about it somehow.

  A small voice, buried deep, said she could still do it. Sell them all out. Secure a Rank 6 position just like that. She had betrayed Gretna before. What was a bit more betrayal? Between friends. Nothing, really. She could make her way back to the City, back to the bosom of grandmother and her cronies. She could have real power as Rank 6. Real power.