iRemember had pulled the Tranquelle over the eyes of the people. They didn’t know. The City, in the warm embrace of the desert dunes, was dying.
It had to be. After all, it had made memory the fibre of its being.
Frome had been so good at puffing Tranquelle smoke into people’s eyes that she had done it to herself. Fallen for her own rose-tinted picture of reality. She was no philosopher. But a tyrant. And an addict. And she did not see the inexorable logic of what it was iRemember had built.
If you listened hard, you could hear the parching, like the rustle of rodents. Bricks desiccating. Concrete drying and cracking. Carbon fibre becoming brittle. Children could hear it inside the dome. At night. They told their parents about it. They were scared. But no one believed them. It was just their imagination. They were sure they could hear it, though. A sound like that made by a bowl of rotting fruit.
The desert eats everything that comes out of the City. The sand covers it all, leaving not a trace.
And in the desert, in a hut made of reclaimed plastic with a protective Lethene coating, languished a woman who was once Helena Frome. Only yesterday.
My arms are telling me I am an old woman. I must have been a young woman once. But none of that remains. Soon I will be desert woman. Then all desert. No woman left at all.
Tranquelle withdrawal meant the desert woman was seeing reality inside out.
The precision of not being able to see space without seeing the equations it consisted of, after decades of soft focus, shredded nerves. It was altogether too much. Like a statue exposed to a changing regime, Frome crumbled. Her brain, addled and made soft by years of Tranquelle abuse and over-exposure to the memories of other people, forgot itself.
Reality was too bright a light.
When it was finished, there was very little left.
The hiss of the grains as they shuffle together. Closing in. Insidious, tiny bringers of death.
Plink.
Plink.
Plink.
Rocks expanding in the heat. Cracking. Bursting like boils.
The desert woman didn’t think any of these things. She heard them. She sat in the little plastic hut. Feeling empty. And looking for her identity like a bunch of keys. But the great ruler she had been was nested somewhere, like the City in the desert, the smallest in a set of Russian dolls. With features that had rubbed away, as if they had never been formed. It was like peeling an onion. Each layer revealed another layer, just as blank, and made her eyes sting.
The desert was the same kind of blankness to the woman inside it. It perfectly reflected the contents of her mind.
But in reality, the desert is not an empty place.
It is a place too full. Of remnants of things that have been. Tiny granules, the ground-down teeth of history. A wastepaper bin, full of interesting literature. For those who know how to read it. Presumably history’s dentists.
Frome was not one of these. She had lived in the fabric of history. Been part of it. Too much a part of it. All parts, big and small, end up here, in this fullness, eventually. And Frome was a pocked molar, ready for extraction.
If anyone ever bothered to look, and found the hut with an emaciated, surgically altered skeleton inside, it would no doubt be written off, in some digital dossier, as an insurgents’ den. A hideout for the rebel groups roaming the desert, plotting the City’s demise.
No one would find the woman. No one had been near the rock formation that looked like a television since the ’70s, when it was still one of the many lakes that had existed in this area. A playground for the glitterati and the Bureau chiefs. The City had gulped it away, like a long, tall glass of water. And, in its insatiable thirst, had moved on to the Tranquelle Belt, where it stuck the curly straw of industry.
So Frome, or the woman who had been Frome, sat. After enough sitting she inadvertently reached a state of enlightenment. Unburdened by ego. Even if that ego had been stolen from her.
She had been set free. And it was a frightening freedom. Hot and dry. The kind of freedom that can kill you.
She had built her Empire on the belief that nothing mattered but character. Her character. Now, feeling like fragmented light passing through the prism that was Desert Ring 1, she was learning that nothing really mattered. Least of all, character. Perhaps even matter ceased to matter, when you really got down to it. In the heat.
The door on the hut was not locked. She could have escaped, once she tore through the cables that tied her to the chair. Which she did pretty quickly. Jinx had had his tech tie a fancy knot for him. It was no match for Frome’s fingernails and brute force.
A crawling sensation behind her ears and over the skin of the forearms. Cells awakening.
Frome began to make sense of her new world.
There was cracked plastic all around her. And then she saw something that terrified her so much she had to cower in the furthest corner from it. Some kind of desert shaman, in a silvery haze. It appeared in the corner, but disappeared when she ran away from it. It was only by being far enough away from it that she kept the strange presence at bay. It was a primal self-preservation impulse that kept her huddled in one corner. Eventually, however, stuck in a Tranquelle withdrawal memory-loop, she would forget what she had seen. And the absurd dance with the ghost would begin all over again. Frome and her reflection in a pocked and time-eaten piece of shiny steel were like two bluebottles, bumping against the same, futile pane.
This went on for some time. Eventually, she must have retained some memory of the reflection, or lost interest in it. Maybe somewhere in the back of her mind she even found the second presence comforting.
Reality is at its strangest when there is nothing but reality around you. Nothing to do. But be. No longer obsessed with the experiences of others, retaining power, saving the Empire from inevitable extinction, Frome became obsessed with the touch of plastic boards underneath her fingers. She did not know that the desert would be cold at night. So she didn’t stop to fear it. She was instead completely engrossed in the immediate experience of heat.
All her problems with stakeholders and leaked Bad Memories, her multiple addictions and the banality of the Bureau, had been swept away.
This would be a different kind of rebirth to the endless surgeries she had endured over the years. Her very soul was being sandblasted by the desert winds. And it was taking on its quintessential shape. All the unnecessary parts were just melting away.
She had taken off the suit. Like shedding skin. She had examined the scars of surgery. Failed to understand and recognise them. She had felt them with her fingertips. Her history had been written on her flesh. But it was written in a language she no longer had the memory to decipher. So instead, she just ignored them. That was just the way things were.
Interior time was strange. Frome had been entirely reborn. Changed. Sublimated. She had, in her mind, lived in the tiny desert hut with the postage-stamp window for years. She had not questioned why, in this, her universe, the sun never went out. She was the desert woman, in the hut of eternal day. And her scars were the battle wounds of some desert war. Which she had won. Obviously. The lone survivor. She would rule. She was happy with the thought that there was so much sand to rule. She curled up in the corner, using her suit as a pillow and fell fast asleep. She dreamed of her Empire. Heat and sand.
But then a sound and a presence disturbed her slumber.
***
Icara stretched in the heat of the cab. A beaten-meat feeling in the limbs. Neither she nor Gretna spoke. The prospect of what was to come hung heavy around them. A palpable vapour. Their eyes were always on the road. Trucker Steve was always mumbling something, but he seemed content. There was a lot of road out there. They were not in the City yet. She could still make out the bulging heads of Tranquelle crops all around, pendulous and purple. The digital display on the dash said it was nine o’clock. But
somehow Icara couldn’t believe it. They drove on silently through field after Tranquelle field and passed occasional township checkpoints, marked by twinkling billboards covered in beautiful Citizens, basking in the glow of Belt sunshine, under umbrellas wreathed with red plastic flowers. They had Tranquelle pills the size of olives in their shiny Martini glasses.
Welcome to Snard – You are now leaving Snard.
The Belt must be bigger than she had imagined. She’d seen it on maps. The familiar circles of City, Desert, Belt, Desert, nestled together like a stack of coins, largest to smallest. The Bureau must have made the City appear larger than it really was on these maps. Mostly, as long as the Tranquelle was flowing, nobody minded either way.
The sun had come up. Big, red, and hot. Unforgiving. The Sun of Scientifically Proven God. Icara could feel the backs of her arms sticking to the seat. The cab was no longer a warm cocoon. This is what it would feel like to travel inside a peptic ulcer. The soles of her feet were burning.
The thought of going back to the City brought with it all kinds of conflicted feelings. Would it work? Could she simply blink back onto iRemember? Would Mem-Convict really start publishing her Bad Memories, just like that?
Gretna was restless. Playing with Steve’s collection of lighters. Smoking. Fiddling with the wireless.
They were closing in on the dusty preamble of Desert Ring 1. The City was so close now, you could almost imagine it. Like the last paragraph. A few more full stops.
They drove. Icara watched the landscape go by. The topography of the State. iRemember’s cruel, exploitative geographies.
And a pile of boulders in the shape of a television set.
‘Can’t you step on it Steve? We’re kind of in a rush. Got an empire to topple, sweedpea.’
Steve stared daggers. ‘She’s going as fast as she can. You can’t rush the Dowager Countess. She’s old-fashioned nobility. And she’ll do just what she needs to do. And take her own time to do it, too.’
He sniffed and refused to speak to Gretna for fifteen minutes, during which time Gretna continued to fiddle with the wireless.
‘The Dowager Countess, my Lethene patch!’ Gretna sucked her teeth. ‘She’s an oil-leaking death trap, sweedpea. Junk! Her wireless doesn’t even work.’
Icara was sure Steve would kick Gretna out of the cab there and then, but he must have owed her a lot of favours. Steve didn’t look like a man with too many Bad Memories. But who was to say, thought Icara, that Gretna wasn’t the only thing between him and the Slam? As if the Countess had heard Gretna’s comments about the wireless, the wireless blazed into life with a soft, haughty crackle.
‘Frome dead. Long live Frome,’ it said.
It was too impossible to be registered as real. To be registered at all.
Gretna tried another track and increased the volume. There was a weather forecast for the Belt. Children were advised to stay indoors for the early part of the day due to toxic dust clouds. And then: ‘Frome dead. Long live Frome.’
‘I hate these fake April 1st broadcasts.’
‘It’s not April...’ said Icara.
‘Frome dead. Long live Frome.’
‘Frome dead. Long live Frome.’
‘Frome dead. Long live Frome.’
It was as if reality shifted in front of them. Their plans went up in a puff of Tranquelle vape. Strawberry flavour.
The words were repeated on every state wireless channel until they lost all meaning. Instead they began to sound like breathing. The last death rattle of Frome herself.
Eventually, in desperation, Gretna clambered over the seats to the back of the rig and pulled a packet of Tranquelle out. The disposable screen confirmed the worst.
There it was in glorious Mem-colour. An artificial memory designed by Emily and Jinx. The hive-mind of iRemember was broadcasting. The Glitz. The State Dining Room. And Lucian Ffogg. Dressed in the black and white duds of a serving-boy. A ridiculous, hyperbolic memory.
There would be a trial.
Icara felt her feet icy, in the Belter heat. And her hands, too. The time-stamp on the footage taken straight from iRemember was wrong. It had to be. Because it was the very day the servers in Lot 458 had exploded. And Icara had seen Lucian in the Desert with her own eyes.
‘It’s impossible. It’s a false memory,’ she whispered. ‘Can they do that?’
The footage shimmered in response. Real as day.
iRemember. Perfect memories. Perfectly preserved.
They were passing a rocky outcrop. Before they could register what they had heard, they were jolted back to the now by something smashing bloodily into the windscreen, and the screech of the Countess’ barely-functioning brakes.
Steve hurled expletives, and clambered over Gretna and Icara. He couldn’t get out into the desert fast enough. Something ignoble had dared to throw itself under the wheels of his noble rig.
As she stepped out into the unbearable heat of the desert, Icara felt the wind hit her like time, as it had once done in Gurk’s basement. She remembered getting off the plane in Lot 458, what felt like a hundred centuries ago. Here she was out in the desert again. And again, she was standing over an almost-corpse. This time, the twitching, broken bag of flesh beneath her was none other than Helena Frome herself.
Gretna was crouched in the sand. Checking for a pulse.
Icara knew there would be none. The Head of State looked like an electrical sock puppet with the power turned off. She had never felt much softness towards her grandmother – not in life. But the limpness of the thing on the tarmac made her feel soft. And sad and small.
Where, in all this, she thought, is Scientifically Proven God?
‘Don’t stare at her like a puppy, Icara. There’s a lab tag number embossed into her neck. It’s just one of the clones, thank Scientifically Proven God.’
But she’s still something that was breathing and isn’t.
A quick holo-link with Louis confirmed that the real Helena Frome was still alive, though indisposed.
No state funerals for clones.
Icara wrapped her sweatshirt around the clone and made Gretna bury her in a sand dune. Another of Frome’s suffering children. The desert woman, laid to rest in her empire.
‘Frome dead. Long live Frome,’ whispered Icara, her hands shaking.
They couldn’t go further until Steve had repaired his transit. At Louis’ suggestion, Gretna made her way to the little hut, looking for clues of the perpetrator. Icara followed, but her feet caught on something buried in a pile of sand, and she landed painfully, adding to the map of bruises along her hip. A few metal finger tips poked up through the blanket of dust.
Icara didn’t have to see the rest to know that it was Jinx. Unlucky as his name. A fall guy. Fallen. His death nothing more than a pun for the amusement of Scientifically Proven God. Again.
He looked so sad lying there. The wind picked up and made a plaintive rustling sound as it threw more dust over metal.
‘Gret!’ shouted Icara over the wind that was coming in faster and faster gusts. ‘Jinx! It’s Jinx!’
Gretna barely acknowledged him.
‘He died in the Belt,’ she said. ‘Maybe even before that. Come on, let’s get back to the cab. A storm’s blowing in. Come on! If you still want to have skin tomorrow, sweedpea!’
Icara stood next to the pile of sand a little longer. She watched the curve of Jinx’ tech implants. More android than man. Those fingers had tried to kill her. Now, there they lay. Scrap metal. He had been used. A tool for someone who wanted power as much as Frome. As much as Icara had, once. A thought pricked, like a loose tooth. An ersatz Frome relegated to the desert.
A false memory used to fake a death. What was the name of that department Frome had set up a few years ago? A laughable department. A place even iRemember had chosen to forget about. The Swansong Centre for Narrat
ive Development. Someone who was smart enough to outsmart Frome. Desperate enough for revenge to leave a trail of dead behind her. A message Icara had received and ignored when she first arrived in Lot 458. There it was. Written in the sand. A message from her mother.
Something crunched inside her. The crushed remains of a soft-marshmallow feeling. The last time she had seen her mother was on a holo-link, congratulating her for getting into the Bureau. Behind all the plotting. Behind the job loss. Jinx’s boss. Who could beat Frome at her own game, if not the Bureau darling? The legend? The woman Icara had spent her adult life trying to emulate.
Frome was in hiding, but her City had already been taken from her. If Emily was behind this, they would have to hurry. She might already have taken control of Mem-Convict. The plan Icara had risked her life for might come to nothing.
She couldn’t know for sure until she went back to the place it all began. iRemember, the Children of Frome. All of it.
***
The border, punctuated at intervals by green-suited Border Bureaucrats (a special divison of Frome’s government, and the most isolationist members of an already all-too-insular empire), was a fragile veil between the City and the desert which wanted to swallow it. Little more than a sliver of red tape.
Frome’s Empire and the Bureau were so fearful of unauthorised entry into the domed paradise, one would have imagined they would have built a seriously impervious structure. Something with lasers. Instead, the border was just a gap. An empty space. Leading to a no-man’s land before the first zip-lock tendril of the dome began. Tentatively.
It was possible to imagine that the Empire’s fear of infiltration was not altogether unfounded, judging by the queue of vehicles, pods and old-fashioned Tranquelle transits honking horns, sounding sirens, and generally making noise. So many bodies desperate to get into the City zone. Mostly the convoys were made up of independent Tranquelle traders, ready to line the City streets with more of the pink stuff. These were welcomed, with a perfunctory stamp and a slap on the back.
There were also convoys carrying sentient cargo. Belters whose land had been taken over by mining or production. People who had nowhere else to go, so had come to the place they knew they wouldn’t be welcome. Frome’s City.
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