Gretna’s speech seemed coarse and barren without the sweedpea. But anyone could see that she was in no mood for leguminous nomenclature. It didn’t matter either way to Icara who had long since stopped hearing her.
Gretna stayed.
***
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Hhhhhhhhhhhh!’
Sucking breath. Spittle. The world smelled of iodine. Singed hair.
Helena Frome screamed. But the doctors and nurses didn’t hear her.
iRemember’s leader woke up from anaesthetic. She had survived another organ failure. Infantile. Reborn. Feeling like a Fromemass ham. Sliced open. Stitched up again. Waking up into her reality, as if into a nightmare. An endlessly repetitive one. An ancient, looped gif file. There were no cute cats in this one. Only Louis was there. Reading a fashion magazine on his touch-screen wireless. Endlessly scrolling with one hand, and rubbing her feet with the other.
It was these moments that made Helena Frome feel really old.
‘Get me out of here, Louis. And cancel the meeting with Big Brother. I want my chair. And a bottle of the sweet and brown.’
Sometimes, she felt like Louis was the only one that understood. But of course, he didn’t. He didn’t care about her. He was just really good at his job. She leaned in to the sweet sensation of massage.
Scientifically Proven God damn it was he good at his job!
***
Other people’s memories felt different. That was the first thing you learned during Academy training. Remember. The volume of other voices shouting horrors made her forget.
A thousand desperate voices drowning out her own. If she could just stop listening, she would hear something else.
I am more than these pasts.
More than my own, even.
I am a spinning Frome dollar with a tracker in it. A firework in the Carnival District. Gretna. I am Gretna Greene’s friend. And if I can be brave for just half a second, and hold on a moment longer, the images will pass. They will be past. I will outrun them. Into something like a future.
Her eyelids pulsed with the effort.
Methodically. Memory by memory, looping back to the present. She had not nearly died in the Sub-Urbs, under the Superloop, or in the caverns under the belt, to die for real. For nothing. She followed the lizard along the crease of Gretna’s elbow, up the soft dimpled arm. The road made of the digital fireworks in the Carnival District. Back to herself.
She was Icara. There. Deep in the pit of her stomach. A whisper of a feeling. A feeling without the Government logo stamped on it. The feeling of home.
‘Scientifically Proven God damn it, Gretna. You don’t know me at all. It’s blue. It’s always been Scientifically Proven God-damned blue!’
***
It rained. Fat. Warm. Gretna tears.
***
The plan was simple. They’d make their way back to the City. Where Gretna would arrange a meeting with Frome. Have Frome’s meddling little fingers dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s on the downfall of her empire. That part had been Gretna’s idea. Her own little revenge. Gretna wanted to watch her do it. Once there, Louis would extract Icara’s Lethene patch and they would use Frome’s special privileges to reinstate Icara’s iRemember profile. Frome wouldn’t suspect a thing until it was too late. No one would believe that anyone, even a Bureaucrat like Icara, could hold so many Bad Memories in her head. And Mem-Convict would do what it had always done. Stream the information out, like bad news, across the screens of the empire.
When they returned to the motel after another painful, jolting ride in the Viccies’ transit pod, Gretna made the call by holo-link.
Icara nursed her bruises and played with the empty memory stick that still hung around her neck. Cheap Belter tat. She stared at the garish motel wallpaper. Occasionally a ghost would creep across her vision. But she was back in control. All she had to do was blink it away.
Icara thought seeing her grandmother again might reignite some of the old feeling she had had for her job and the Bureau. But watching the shrewd hologram eyes above the grey wool, that body armour, all she felt was sick and sorry. Frome had allowed her own self to become collateral damage in her endless war for power.
Before dawn broke through the velvety smog of the Belt, they were back on the road in Trucker Steve’s pink rig. This time complete with Trucker Steve at the wheel. He was happy to have them there. The drive to the City was usually boring as hell. He didn’t ask what they were going to the City for. Gretna’s Lethene River contacts knew not to ask too many questions.
They hurtled and bounced along broken tarmac. Delivering more than Tranquelle to the Glitz and City. The truck was incredibly old-fashioned. The fumes of tyres and combustion were heady. Tobacco smoke filled the cab. Plastic trinkets jingled at every bounce. Steve’s own brand of chintzy religion. Sharing a conspiratorial bubble with the warm, sour smell of Trucker Steve, and Gretna’s smokey cigar scent, Icara found herself almost happy, despite the headful of horrors. For the first time, since...since she first thought it would be easy to become Head of State. But maybe even before that.
She watched the fields full of purple stalks and purple buds become flecks of colour in the wing mirror. This moment, thought Icara, is worth recalling. As she allowed herself to fall asleep, after nights of twitchy wakefulness in the tunnels, she gloried in the fact that that memory would be hers alone. No one else’s. To pass through no machinery. To be left in a volatile state that would eventually allow it to pass into oblivion. To die. A memory like a human life. You live, imperfectly, and then you’re gone. Memories that can’t be forgotten lose their value, like a life that cannot end. Perfect recall had, in seeking to extend their life, rendered even good memories lifeless.
***
FROME DEAD. LONG LIVE FROME.
A bulletin straight from Scientifically Proven God. Emily’s memo had landed. Paper setting the Bureau on fire.
No one bothered to call Frome to check whether she was alive. Her death was written on paper. With the office seal of the Brethren on it. It could not be unwritten. Who would bother to make up a thing like this? Besides, they would have got a busy tone. Emily had made sure all of the Cabinet calls rerouted to her own holo-link.
The woman who had watched it grow, who had made iRemember what it was, was dead.
The Corporeal Administrators cancelled the transit pod full of chilled, hanging clones. The pod stood out in the parking lot. Waiting. Frome’s replacement organs. Abattoir-fresh. With nowhere to go.
Although Frome was apparently gone, the world had not quite shifted to account for her absence. It was unimaginable. An empty Chesterfield chair. Without a grey-suited bottom, and a bottle of Bureau Bourbon. The City had entered a strange twilight between existence and nonexistence.
There was no contingency plan. Everyone had arrived in the Council Room hoping that there was such a plan, set out by those higher up. But as the room filled to the brim with the highest of the high, the great and the good of the Bureau, it became clear that the reason they did not know of a plan in the event of Frome’s death was that there had never been such a plan. Only a freezer full of spare parts.
When your best plan is a room full of scalpels and kidneys, you know you’re in trouble.
Yet she had proven to be unkillable for over half a century. The woman who had shouted at them in corridors, intimidated them in private and in public. The woman who had sent bouquets to their homes for their children’s birthdays, big bunches of red flowers, and cards for Fromemass, with a stencilled tasteful likeness of her face, but had ruined the benign leader effect with her threatening notes. The woman who owned iRemember. And had the deeds to prove it. The registered keeper of the network that owned all of the rest of them.
Of course everyone had known that this might change one day. Scientifically Proven Hell, they might have even secretly, extremely subcons
ciously, hoped for it. But not now. Not like this. Not this day.
The day appeared to have come.
She was really dead.
The green suits felt the world as they knew it shifting beneath their feet. But decades of torpor made them as flexible and inventive as a dried stalk of Tranquelle.
Puffing on their vapes, in a cloud of vanilla-scented smoke, the Cabinet huddled together in the Council Room.
Emily was present by holo-link.
The meeting went ahead. At the ungodly hour of 3am. Under the cover of the semi-darkness afforded by the orange firefly drones that circled the building.
The heads of the various sections of the Bureau announced their presence. There were apologies from the representatives of the Brethren. There was nothing unusual about that. Everyone knew that the Brethren wouldn’t leave the plushy interiors of the Temple unless there was a really good spread on. And almost certainly not at 3am.
They were quorate anyway.
The meeting was in session.
Frome’s will and testament was produced by an emissary from the Temple in wide, billowing robes that fully concealed arms covered in tech implants. The will was an excellent forgery on the highest-quality paper that could be found in all the land. The stamp of the Temple shimmered and glittered, proclaiming the document to be Scientifically Proven God’s Honest Truth. Jinx had done his job perfectly. In the will, Frome waxed lyrical about family values. And second chances. She brought Emily, her estranged daughter, back into the fold. And she begged the Cabinet, her second family, to do the same.
The Cabinet were too dazed to argue.
Emily’s shimmering holo-form sat at the head of the table, acting Head of State until the next succession. Excuse me, she cleared her throat. Election. The succession... Excuse me. Election.
For a brief and unpleasant moment, among the quiet greyness of the assembled Bureaucrats, a peal of bell-like, hysterical laughter exploded. Proximity to what you want is wont to make you giddy. Emily’s hologram looked around the table. The men and women in the green suits. Who had been handed their power by accident, when it didn’t matter who sat under Frome. Because everyone knew who made the real decisions. Their faces not understanding. Their pupils dilated. Their eyes glued to their identical green wireless touch-screens. Shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Dreaming of their beds. The rug of normality pulled from beneath their Squid Skin™-coated feet. They went on as if they hadn’t heard her laughing at them. Perhaps they hadn’t.
Her plan was working too perfectly.
She was wrong about that. But she was right about the succession. Election. It would be easy enough. Whoever felt arrogant enough to rule would simply put their names in the ring. And the good people in the City – not including the large migrant population from the Tranquelle belt, who would be better off organising a Tranquelle Belt election – the good people of the City could cast their votes. Discreetly. An act not watched by iRemember. The ballots were paper. It therefore was a sacred rite. And as such the Brethren would oversee it. Emily felt a little thrum somewhere deep in her guts as she opened the second part of the meeting.
Item 2.
She asked if there was anyone in the running. No hands went up. She felt her own elbow unfold. And a whistle from deep within. This was it. The Power. She would be standing unchallenged. In which case the Brethren would pick someone from among their ranks to run as a second.
No one ever voted for the Brethren.
Emily ran a pleasant tongue-twister in her head. Delectably unelectable.
Scientifically Proven God was on Emily’s side, it seemed.
Item 3.
The trial. It would go ahead. Tomorrow.
There was nothing much to discuss. Everyone knew how trials worked. Emily briefly told the suits gathered around the table that the perpetrator had been apprehended. And was in a holding cell just outside the City. She wanted to be present at the trial of the man who had murdered her mother. She would be on her way in a transit to the Temple with the heinous criminal tomorrow afternoon. The trial would be televised on the big screens in Memorial Park.
Item 4.
Any Other Business.
Of course there was none. People had already started packing their touch-screens away, happy that someone else was taking responsibility for the biggest change to affect the City in the last sixty years.
Maybe no one really believed the irrefutable reality of Frome’s death.
They had read the memo. They had felt the seriousness of the paper. But at 3am things feel a little unreal. They would surely awake to find it had all been a dream.
FROME DEAD. LONG LIVE FROME.
***
I might as well be dead.
This is what Frome thought when she woke up from her whisky-laced catnap with desert sunlight burning through to the very backs of her eyeballs, making her brain boil. It’s what she always thought when she first opened her eyes.
The gritty feeling in her mouth, too, was nothing unusual, but she knew, as two visions coupled horribly and exposed a primal scene of heat and dust before her, that she was no longer in her walnut-lined office.
The chafed feeling around her wrists and ankles made her think for a second that she had scheduled another body-part replacement and forgotten all about it. This wasn’t unheard of. But the absence of doctors and nurses like chimeras, and sharp and blunt cutting objects, made this last conjecture DOA.
The air was bitumen-thick. Her office and the operating theatre both had the benefit, like all City spaces, of a gently whispering air-conditioner. She liked it cold.
Wherever she was, it was too warm.
Frome was tied to a chair in the centre of a plastic hut. Dunes rustled and tumbled against the yellowed Plexiglas of a window. A square, scratched porthole. A little plastic ship in a dry storm of silica. Near a pile of rocks shaped like a television set.
Incomprehension was replaced by panic and the desperate desire to tear off her woollen suit. Someone had left her this maddening, boiling dignity. The same someone had placed a single glass of water in a corner of the hut. Out of reach.
Anger and revenge thoughts made survival a little more likely. Not by much. But a little could go a long way.
Emily Swansong wasn’t a murderer. Frome’s eventual death in the desert would be of natural causes. What could be more natural than nature? Jinx had drugged Frome and taken her out into the desert, just as Emily had told him. He took away her Tranquelle and left her there.
Frome, the leader, felled on sandy infinity like some kind of ancient, gnarled tree.
But Jinx Ende wasn’t to last much longer than the once mighty Frome oak. He was no longer useful to Emily. She told him as much, before she killed him, and made a pun about death, endings, and his surname. It wasn’t very original. But Emily didn’t apologise for it. She had no need to be original. She could pay other people to be. As of that moment, she owned iRemember.
Jinx’ corpse crumpled in the sand. The metal bits of him getting hot in the sun.
His last thought had been what a pity it was that he had never replaced his back. That was still human. And he could still be stabbed in it.
***
For months before the end, there were bad omens all over the sky in the northwest sector of the Belt. A flock of pigeons was seen making shapes with right angles. Some Belters said the shapes were messages from Scientifically Proven God. Those who tried to decode them failed. There was a plague of roaches in the air-conditioning vents, the only sky in Blue Haven. The impending catastrophe was quite carefully signposted. Plain as day if anyone had bothered to look.
Nobody did. Least of all Emily Swansong. She was busy with other things.
As the sky clotted on the morning after Frome’s death, Emily was preparing for a journey. Lucian was to be transported from the Swansong Centre for N
arrative Development to a holding cell at the Temple. For penance, before his trial. The Brethren had several ways of performing the ceremony of the penance. One of which was ominously called Interment in the Room of Paper Cuts.
Lucian was transported, unaware of the nightmare that awaited him, under a heavy, purple blanket of Tranquelle. He was living a beautiful memory dream. He and Emily were reunited. Waltzing around the University campus, surrounded by rapidly shrinking and growing singing roses.
There was a sort of waltz. Emily had wrapped Lucian in a straitjacket, for easy transportation. And was bundling him unceremoniously up the cellar steps, out through the hall, over a patch of desert, and into the deep, dark interior of a transit pod. It was larger than a normal transit. The shape and size of a Superloop pod, with space for Lucian, Emily and some kind of magnetic torture device. Energy-efficient batteries thrummed gently when the acceleration button was pressed. But while it stood parked outside it made no noise at all. It looked like an elongated, enlarged black pill. And for most prisoners it would have been a bitter pill to swallow. If they were not sedated and swaddled in tightly buckled jackets.
The distance between the Swansong Centre for Narrative Development and the Temple was significant. But for Emily the distance had shrunk to the size of a conjunction. It was merely an ‘and’, in the long sentence of her plot to overthrow Frome. At the very most a ‘then’.
The hard part was over.
She pressed the big red button. And fell back into a reverie.
Lucian slumped in the corner, still dreaming.
Their next stop would be the City border-control gate. For which, it was common knowledge, you needed steel nerves and your wits about you. Frome herself had been stopped and searched at this border. Even if it had been a publicity stunt, trying to skip the procedures was not a risk worth taking. Not now.
Not when she was so close.
***
A memory is inconsequential. It is unimportant. It is everything that came before. Insubstantial. While you dwell on it, time passes and it’s gone. Memory is not.
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