iRemember

by S. V. Bekvalac

  Icara dreamed she was back in her old office. They handed her a rise. And a free pass to the rest room only the top-ranking officials could use. And just as they handed it all to her, the novelty calendar on her desk caught fire. Icara tried to put it out, but before long, everything was melting. The sad little plastic eyes of the cat plopped onto her melting desk. Then the space changed and she found she wasn’t in her old office at all. She was in Lot 458.

  At the centre of the burning Lot, in the shade of a Tranquelle stalk stump, Helena Frome stood. Replicating. Juddering jelly forms. Unpleasant mitosis. There were thirteen Fromes. Only they were novelty blow-up Frome dolls. The kind you might find on Fromemass Day, in some of the more laissez-faire Bureaucratic households. They floated off into the air. But one stayed behind, reading Icara’s psych-evaluation report.

  It seems, ex-Inspector Swansong, that you have a problem with substance abuse. Do you know what the Code prescribes for operatives labouring under such a malady?

  The rubber doll jabbed Icara in the nape of the neck with an enormous syringe.

  Icara woke up screaming, to feel thin, creeping fingers cold as metal pipes tugging at the Keep-safe around her neck. She had had nightmares like this since the Lot. It came with sleeping without a Dreammaker. So at first she thought the thief, whose face was shrouded in the pocket dark of a hood, was a leftover dream wisp.

  She rolled to the left just in time to avoid the live end of a sick-stick.

  ‘Gretna!’ She screamed.

  Gretna didn’t reply. She had already been immobilised. She lay limply across the motel carpet. In the green glow of the emergency lighting she looked dead.

  Icara heard the baton whistle through the air by her ear and rolled again.

  Magrat, Lucian, Gurk. And now you, Swansong, it whistled over and over. This was confirmation, and violent confirmation, that Gretna had been telling the truth.

  The sick-stick grazed her side. The pain was almost too much. With a desperate effort, she arched her back and asked her exhausted body to do as it had been taught in the Bureau gym. She lunged for the would-be thief. She connected. But she had been made slow by days of terror and inertia Off-Grid. The dark shape twisted from her grip, and crawled unnaturally up the wall, and through the window, like a human insect.

  He was gone.

  ‘Did he get it?’ she heard Gretna’s voice ask. Gretna had come to and was lumbering groggily across the room, groping at furniture to steady herself.

  He’d have to try harder. The memory stick still hung around Icara’s neck.

  Together they watched a shrinking Off-Gridder form slithering away through the Tranquelle fields, disappearing finally into a pulsing, purple thicket.

  ‘Jinx, the motherless son of a Brother. Jinx Ende.’

  Gretna sat down heavily against a wall. Disbelieving. One more betrayal.

  ‘If I ever see him again, I’ll wring his tech-enhanced neck. I thought he was one of the good ones. He’s the one person I thought would never… I told him everything. He knows. Everything. I… Everything!’

  The words were heavy and thudding. He knew everything and now he knew where they were.

  ‘Do you think he’s working for Frome too? Maybe she’s double-crossing you like you’re double-crossing her?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Icara. Frome would never work with Jinx. He’s too erratic. Unreliable. Besides, I already told her the memories are secure. She thinks I’m bringing you in. Why would she send a thief like Jinx? How did I not see it? I should have seen it. Wonder what my friendship was worth to him. A few extra bits of tech? Something to make him taste colour? When I nearly died saving him from a Bureau raid in Blue Haven last year. And Gurk…’ Gretna said bitterly, and closed her eyes.

  At least there was no need to wait for the results from Louis.

  ‘How could he?’ whispered Gretna.

  They sat for a while in silence, shaking with the adrenaline of the attack. Icara blinked away the image of Gurk.

  As she held it, she knew the Bioware in the stick was already starting to oxidise, the nutrients in the thick paste running out. Soon the memories would start consuming themselves. It wouldn’t last much longer outside of a server. The longer she hung on to it, the more attempts on her life there would be. It was a death sentence. Gretna wanted to bide her time. But Icara knew they would have to act soon.

  ***

  Over a greasy trucker breakfast the next day, when Icara suggested negotiating with Frome, Gretna said it was suicide.

  ‘You know your grandmother. No matter what deal we make, we’ll lose.’

  No deals.

  When she suggested the other thing, Gretna dismissed it out of hand.

  ‘You’ve lost it, sweedpea. Too much Belter Surprise.’

  But it might work. Icara’s mind raced with possibilities. The thought came forth pearl-like, from the crud of experience. iRemember. Lucian Ffogg. Tech junkies. Bad Memories. Mem-Convict. Mem-Convict. Mem-Convict.

  They had both been working so hard to hide from Frome, and at the same time topple her empire. What if they just stopped fighting? Why not put Frome’s nasty little department of justice to work instead?

  Total Recall.

  Icara’s idea was beautiful because she wouldn’t have to do anything, except get caught. Suture the memories into herself and then get plugged back in to iRemember. Mem-Convict would do the rest. After Icara’s iRemember profile was reinstated, there would be nothing Frome or the Brethren could do. Frome’s own apparatus would cannibalise itself, becoming a media agency for its own True Crime drama.

  She hadn’t worked out the finer points of the plan, but she was sure Gretna knew a guy. Gretna always knew a guy. Look at Trucker Steve, for example.

  ‘Of course I know someone, sweedpea, but it’s just too dangerous.’

  It was dangerous, yes. Icara had seen Total Recall happen with her own eyes. But what had happened to Lucian was an accident. There had been no time to prepare. Besides, Lucian was hardly what you’d call Rank 4 material. It would take a true and seasoned Bureaucrat to take down the iRemember Bureaucracy. With her years of training, unrivalled efficiency, and techniques she had engineered in the small hours while writing reports for Frome, Icara would fare far better. She had to. Besides, Lucian had been alone. She had a friend.

  ‘Think about it Gret. I’ve had years of experience sitting in on internal monologues, riding the chemical waves of other people’s minds. If anyone can do it, I can.’

  Gretna still hesitated. The Bad Memories would be an engram graft that would cleave to Icara, like a parasitic organism, feeding on her blood instead of Bioware. She would be carrying a section of mind that was, and was not, her own. Every murder would feel like she’d done it. And her body, and mind, would react accordingly.

  ‘It won’t be like seeing death, Icara. It will be much, much worse. I need you to realise how much worse.’

  This has to end. It has to end with me. I promised Gurk. Scientifically Proven Hell, I promised Frome when I signed up for Project Eraser. I’ve practically got a Government mandate.

  ‘Fine. But only because I know that whatever I say you’ve made up your mind already. You’ve got that Swansong look in your eye. If I don’t help you you’ll probably try to cut open your own head or something. But know this. If you lose your mind, I won’t be coming to visit you at the sanatorium in the Temple. Spent enough time there in my life. That place gives me the sweed-creeps.’

  Icara laughed even though it wasn’t funny.

  ‘I do know someone. More than a surgeon, sweedpea. She’s an artist. When she implants tech it looks like it grew straight out of your own skin. Got something done there myself.’

  Icara had to admit, it looked incredible.

  Even with a good surgeon it would be risky.

  She might not survive. She looked at
her friend’s face, and wondered what it would be like not to recognise it. For a flash of a second, Icara felt scraps of history wash over her, bright and real. A loop of all the small things that had made their friendship. The Academy desks. Tickets. Tranquelle jingles. A chewed-up Frome dollar. Pigeon wings. Bottle caps. Scars. Packets of Blue Lagoon. Take-away food. More recently, espionage, tech implants, and tracking devices. The shards of the closest thing to a friendship Icara had ever had. It might not have been a perfect friendship, but it was hers. Suddenly, even an imperfect friendship seemed like treasure in an Off-Gridder tunnel. Water in the desert. Life itself. Too much to lose.

  ***

  Deep beneath the Tranquelle roots, cut off from the other Off-Gridder cells by an underground cavity of agricultural runoff the size of the Insurance District, was the smallest and dirtiest Off-Gridder community in Frome’s empire.

  The transit pod had picked them up outside the motel. It had whirred and buzzed, and they had been buffeted around inside it, unseeing. Now it spat them out somewhere underground. Gretna pulled off the hoods they’d been instructed to wear. They watched the pod whir off into the darkness.

  ‘I’ve told them there’s no need for the hoods. Only the pod knows the way. The location is written in a code no human can read. When you try, it deletes itself. But they’re a bit old-fashioned about some things. Come on. This way.’

  A small group of Off-Gridders greeted them. The cell was home to a group of women who called themselves Viccies. Escapees from the Temple sanatorium they called the ‘Slam’. With the scars to prove it. They had found a way to recover from being Forgotten, by replacing the missing part of their brains with tech. Some of them, inexplicably, could remember the Forgetting. It was a horrifying procedure, brutal in its simplicity. It involved a circular saw. And a bucket which started off empty and ended up full. It would come back to them in visions they attributed to divine intervention.

  They believed that the salvation of the world lay in tech and their own distinctly un-scientifically proven Goddess, a desert. A woman made of kinetic sand. They had taken as their high priestess a surgeon who had redesigned herself entirely as a waterfall of built-in tech. She was another of Gretna’s Lethene River acquaintances.

  Icara would have liked her, if she’d had time to think before she Totally Recalled. But the ephemerality of engrams was forcing their hand. Oxidised Bioware would be worse than useless. They had to act fast.

  In a stuffy underground cavern, a misspelled medical degree blinking in a holoframe in the corner, the surgeon opened Icara’s scalp to the elements as if it were a tin of beans.

  When it was closed again, Icara didn’t wake up for a while.

  When she did she wished she hadn’t.

  She remembered a sick compulsion to rub cooked fowl all over her body. It felt so right. And then it felt wrong and slippery. Stomach slipping over chest, slipping over throat. Her insides bubbled up like Belter beer. Then the memory receeded, with a dull ache. But more came in its place.

  Bad Memories shifted. Three murders blinked in quick succession. And the last, a swollen Off-Gridder head, detached from the body, like a nail-clipping. A Bureau operation run by Madris Nag, Icara’s Rank 5 superior. An operation gone wrong. Icara clamped her eyes shut, but the image was in her head and there was nothing to shut it out. All she could do was ride the wave of terror, panic and complicity.

  Memory followed memory. An overwhelming flood of victims. And perpetrators.

  The last memory was of becoming Helena Frome.

  Icara Swansong sits, her grey hair frizzing above the visor metal. She has blisters tugging at the crepe of skin that surrounds her eyes. She hears the gentle bubble of electrons; an effervescence of memories that no longer feel like her own. Though they do belong to her. The green leather of her Chesterfield is creased and puckered. Fused to her body. She is hopped up on Bureau Bourbon, temporal vertigo, and Tranquelle.

  ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Hhhhhhhhhhhh!’

  Sucking breath. Spittle. The world smelled of iodine. Singed hair.

  Icara felt her stomach sink as her eyes opened. It was like being in an anti-gravity chamber. Like falling out of a Government plane at 25,000 feet. Cold and hot. Miserable. Painful. Guilty. Not Guilty. Excuses. Mutterings. Somehow, they made her feel hollow as well as unpleasantly full. Like swallowing a packetful of sky.

  She fainted.

  ***

  When she came to, the surgeon was standing over her. The ex-Inspector screamed and tore at the skin around her neck. She had caught sight of her reflection in a bottle of something purple on a trolley of medical supplies. Who was that person looking back at her? That face. The bandages. Dried blood like peeling paint on an antique doll. Nothing belonged to her. It was like looking at a photograph of someone she knew she should recognise, but didn’t.

  She should have been able to surf the engrams. Instead she was drowning. Watching Icara Swansong recede into the distance, a faraway figure on a shoreline.

  Her body didn’t want to feel like this for a single second longer. Icara’s fist went rogue. It connected with a jaw, sending the surgeon sprawling.

  ‘Where’s Gretna?!’ she heard women’s voices loud-whisper.

  The blurred soup at the edges of her vision heaved. More voices.

  ‘The engrams have gone rogue. Get Gretna! Now!’

  Icara looked down at a distorted image of a fist, that belonged to someone else, but was somehow attached to her arm. She flexed her fingers. Five sad little Tranquelle shoots that belonged to Bad Memories. Fingers that remembered what it was like to close around a throat. And enjoy it.

  A fear so powerful it felt like the whumping of the Superloop. An acid, terrible terror. Of her own self. Her own insides. All the Bureau training in the world couldn’t have prepared her for this.

  She scream-cried anger, fear and frustration. She turned on her side and assumed the foetal position, hugging her hands between her knees.

  It was cold in the medical bay. Like a refrigeration unit in winter.

  The technique the rookies used to cope with the overwhelm of iRemember was to count the memories they could recognise as their own. But Icara couldn’t find any to count. When she found something that reminded her of her, she wondered if it was real. Had she ever been a Bureau employee? Hooked up to iRemember. Sipping Tranquelle pops through a crazy straw at the Diner Museum? Walking on carpeted floors? Had she ever been in control? Had she ever received iRemember messages from someone she had flirted with at a Fromemass party?

  Her body didn’t want to let her think. It was too painful. She began convulsing like Lucian had once done, and she was just as powerless to stop it. Shaking and juddering like the pause function on an ancient VHS.

  Five shapeless shadows tried to restrain her. A face came briefly into focus. Looking at Icara as if she were contagious.

  Icara didn’t see when Gretna rushed into the medical bay.

  ‘Get out of my way! Let me see her!’

  The information videos they were all familiar with had been re-enactments. Total Recall was much uglier in real life. Icara’s skin boiled and puckered.

  ‘I should never have let her do it! Why didn’t any of you Off-Gridder scum try to stop me? Why didn’t you tell me it wasn’t going to work? Why?’

  The Off-Gridders looked at each other, bewildered.

  ‘Sweedpea,’ she said taking Icara’s hand, ‘sweedpea, can you hear me? Can she hear me, Scientifically Proven God damn it?!’

  The waterfall of tech did something clever with some sensors and nodded. ‘But not for long, maybe. I’m so sorry Gret.’

  Not for long turned out to be shorter than anyone expected.

  The juddering stopped. Icara’s eyes stared blankly upwards. A finger twitched. Gretna watched it. A deadly metronome. Each twitch a second closer to the closing of a door. Icara was walking
away and taking their friendship into the dark with her. Tap. Tap. The best, maybe the only, chance to topple iRemember, was being tapped away like the ash on an old-time cigarette. For the first time in her life, Gretna Greene wished she believed in Scientifically Proven God. Or even the Goddess made of sand. It would have made this easier. But all the Great Rustles in the world hadn’t been enough to make Gretna a believer. And now it was too late. Much too late.

  ‘You’re Icara Swansong. Ex Bureau Agent. Rank 4. Your grandmother is a bitch in a grey suit who owns the world. We were going to stop all of it, you and me.’

  Her voice trailed off. Tears in it.

  ‘You’re Icara Swansong. Remember? I remember. You’re uptight as hell and you don’t know how to relax. Once, at the Academy I asked what you did for fun, and you demonstrated by organising my collection of heavy metal T-Shirts in alphabetical order, by band and date of album release. Your favourite colour is orange, like the state logo. I’ve done a lot of horrible junk in the last ten years and I’ve seen a lot of horrible stuff. I’ve seen fields of Off-Gridders burned to a crisp. I’ve seen someone go mad and cut out his own heart. With a plastic knife. Like a take-away meal, sweedpea. And each time, you know what I thought of to remind me that this broken place was maybe worth something?’

  The surgeon ushered the other Off-Gridders out of the room. No one needed to see Gretna Greene cry. She hadn’t done it before. Her face contorted painfully, as if she didn’t know how.

  ‘I thought of the night we walked through the Carnival District. Watching digital fireworks. And some other stuff, obviously, like puppies, and that one amazing mind-blowing night with that one Off-Gridder. But mostly you and me watching fireworks together.’

  The silence was heavy. It coated the room in its tar. A molasses of silence, made of the sounds people make when they stop breathing.

  ‘I am not going to watch this,’ Gretna said to herself. ‘I’m leaving. I’m not going to watch you die. Do you hear me Inspector?’