There were many queues at the border. At the back of a line of vehicles, making its way to a smaller and less well-frequented convicts’ entrance, was Emily Swansong’s black transit pod. Emily had been working on her opening statement to the Council of Brethren. And her acceptance speech as she took on the headship of the Bureau. Looking out into the sweltering, poisonous air, she thanked Scientifically Proven God for air-conditioning. With a motherly gesture, she popped another pink pill into Lucian’s drooling, open mouth. She closed it for him. The swallow reflex did the rest of the work for her.
Emily looked down at Lucian. It reminded her of Jinx, when he’d begged for his life. All these Off-Gridders. They wore the clothes of the truly rebellious. But, like most people, they couldn’t really do it in the end. They were too afraid of pain. Cowards with bad haircuts.
Too many people are too afraid of pain.
She wasn’t afraid of anything. Not any more. She had made herself resilient. Whatever it took to take control. She was about to show them all what happens when you steal power from those destined to be powerful.
She took out her compact mirror and adjusted her make-up. She had aged well. She had to admit it. She looked like an old-fashioned screen starlet, gone only slightly to seed. If Frome was anything to go by, she had decades left in her yet. As she observed her reflection, the defined brows and large brown eyes, she imagined seeing herself on a coin. A spinning coin. Suspended in mid-air.
‘Celebrate the New Republic with a golden circle the size of a small pancake!’ She imagined the election slogans. Four concentric circles, each one of a different colour, representing the map of the State. At the centre, the City, the Bureau, and Emily Swansong’s enigmatic smile.
Despite the air-conditioning, the afternoon heat and the beautiful image of the culmination of her hard work had given her face a film of perspiration. She snapped the compact shut. She could not look this well. She must not look too ruddy. Not for the trial. The mask would have to say: ‘recently bereaved daughter’, but also: ‘in control’. It was a difficult balance to reach.
She was coming out of hiding. The air of mystery would heighten the drama. The City hadn’t seen Emily in person since the late ’80s.
Well, she was returning in style. To her City. She breathed in deeply. She imagined she could already smell the thick, heady scents of the digital flowers in Memorial Park. Synthetic jasmine. Synthetic orange blossom. Synthetic heaven. She imagined she could feel the refreshing damp of the perpetual rain from the misters. On her cheeks that had felt like desert-jerky for so long.
Soon, all of that.
First, there was passport control to get through.
***
The heat set in. The sun was climbing the sky, scarrabing. A heat so hot it left the shock of ice on skin. Icara was no longer able to tell the difference between hot and cold. The sun set the teeth on edge and made them chatter worse than any blizzard. Sweat evaporated before it could run anywhere. Eye sockets felt thirsty.
Steve cranked on the truck’s ancient air-conditioning system. It was so loud it drowned out the sound of the engine. It made the cab shake and jitter. Icara felt vibrations coming up through the soles of her feet, jangling her ankle bones like crockery. The system was loud. And, like all of the systems on the Dowager Countess, it also did not work. The heat made her feel as if she was peeling and expanding. An onion. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop the heat. It only got worse as the sun grew in the sky. A blister ready to pop.
They had finally made it to the end of Desert Ring 1. They were approaching the City, inching along, bound on all sides by other Belter vehicles. All of them making their way to the City’s customs gate.
Anything to declare. Nothing but good old pink gold.
Which is what the customs clerks called Tranquelle. The gleaming chrome juggernaut in front of them obscured any view there might have been. But Icara knew, because it had been her job to know, that somewhere, beyond the horizon of the cooling vent of the truck in front, about a mile down the strip of tarmac they called the landing strip, was an enormous turnstile. Icara remembered her few days of investigations at the border, some years back. She remembered the interviews of those who came through suspected of Off-Gridder sympathies. Beyond the turnstile stood about three hundred Government employees. And one Brother. Who had to personally seal the Tranquelle crates with the Temple sigil, before they could be loaded onto a conveyor belt and onto smaller transit pods that would deliver the pills to City merchants.
The City just lay there. Dosing. Overdosing. Day after day.
Steve would not normally be allowed beyond the turnstile. But with Frome declared dead, there was chaos. The Bureaucrats were putting a brave face on it. They tried to look organised. Maybe to the migrants waiting in line it looked like business as usual. But Icara knew the Bureau in chaos when she saw it. Gretna and Icara used the chaos to their advantage. They made it through the filtration system of three hundred angry border guards with sick-sticks, stun guns and pain pellets, disguised as a crate of Tranquelle.
***
In the Bureau building, the sound of funeral music was making the concrete hum.
There were whispers in the corridors. Stifled half-sounds, made by people who felt they did not have a right to disturb the peace.
Had the Off-Gridders finally done it? Had they won?
Was iRemember over? No? But Frome was dead? Yes. But there was another one. Another one? Another Frome? No. Another Swansong. Emily. The one from the desert? Yes. Scientifically Proven God help us all.
Messages flashed on the screens. All non-essential Bureau work was off for the rest of the day. The Bureau was in mourning. Everyone was to wear their black hats and meet at the Temple for an iRememberance service. There was the patter of hundreds of boots on polished concrete. The odd, slipping sound insinuated itself through the building, making itself felt as sure as misery, and just as subtle.
Two regulation hydrophobic green suits parted from the crowd and flowed against the current. They made their way from the main lobby, down five flights of progressively narrower concrete stairs, and into the dark.
Into the Bureau’s ancient mail room.
A relic of a past system of communication. The place was a different kind of desert. The hardwood floors and the pneumatic mail system tubes (that looked like a replica of the Superloop in miniature) were covered in a layer of dust inches thick. There were no grand entrances. No fancy screens. No tech. Not so much as a CCTV camera. Nothing that would suggest that the mail room was Frome’s bunker. The secret heart of the Bureau. Always had been.
The place had become barely whispered of in myth and legend. Which is exactly what Frome had wanted. No one believes in fairy tales. The mail room was a nasty one. The kind where everyone dies in the end. Here, secrets were buried alive, bricked up and left for dead, in acid-free acetate envelopes.
It was here, among the motes, in a tiny broom-cupboard of an office that used to belong to the Pneumatic Postmaster, that Louis has installed a temporary Chesterfield for the recently, allegedly, deceased Head of State.
Frome was very much alive, but napping, a glass of Bureau Bourbon precariously perched in her lap. Intrigue was exhausting and the mail room was windowless, fusty and warm.
Louis stood guard over her. He was her secretary. But he was also her right hand. And her left. In fact, he was her whole body. They were one and the same. The secretary and the Head of the State. And he guarded her like his own life. Jealously.
Frome opened one shrewd eye, and fixed it on Icara. A bag of knitting lay by Frome’s feet. Where Icara now kneeled, her hands in handcuffs. Gretna’s fake handcuffs she could easily spring out of, but nevertheless they chafed.
Icara thought, as she often did on meeting the Head of the Bureau, how powerful the woman still looked. Despite the glaze of addiction that passed over her pupils li
ke a filmy dream. Despite the years of service. Despite, or maybe because of, the deep wrinkles that drew the edges of her mouth downwards.
‘Louis, tell me, am I dreaming, or is it Agent Swansong?’ Frome’s lips curled sarcistically. ‘Thought you could run, with something that didn’t belong to you. Too bad. I see you met Gretna. My favourite child.’
She turned to Gretna, ‘I trust those nasty pasts are well and truly destroyed?’
‘Yes, sweedpea. Of course. You know, me. Good old Gretna.’
‘Well done.’
There was a shocked silence. Frome never said well done.
‘I suppose I should congratulate you, too, Icara. You look terrible. But alive. There is that. It’s good to be alive. I, on the other hand, am dead. As you must have heard. You are in the presence of a ghost.’
There was a rasping sound like a saw-mill in the dark ages, when trees were less rare. Icara had never heard her grandmother laugh before. That sound had been reserved for Louis.
‘Those Bureau idiots. And that usurper, Emily. A bigger idiot there never was. Except maybe Louis for not realising it was her all along!’
Louis cleared his throat, which he always did when he found something irritating.
‘When I get back up there,’ Frome continued, ‘you’ll see how they run. Like rabbits. Frightened rabbits. Are you scared, Agent Swansong? You should be! Everyone should be!’
At Emily’s name, Frome’s entire face had changed. Emily. Frome’s greatest hope. Her greatest pain. Her disappointment.
Icara remembered her own last meeting with Frome. She had been really scared then. A frightened rabbit herself. She had been so eager to please. She no longer felt like a rabbit squirming on a butcher’s block. Breathing the air of the Bureau again had been hard. Being back in the building felt too much like coming home. But she gently prodded the Bad Memories, searching out a rotten tooth with her mind’s tongue. She was pressing hard reset. Starting again.
The plan. Stick to Gretna’s plan. Like we discussed.
Gretna stood in the corner, Icara’s watchful good-luck charm.
‘You look well, grandmother. But it hurts to see you relegated to the mail room. I know it must be hard.’
There was a long silence. Louis sniffed.
‘I can help you get her. Emily,’ said Icara. ‘But I’ll be needing my profile reinstated. An official pardon. And my job back.’
‘You?’ Frome turned to her granddaughter. ‘You think I need help? From you? A Rank 4? A nobody with a criminal record and a Lethene patch? They measure time according to my immortal body. There was even a plan, for a while, to measure space in Fromes! But I told them it was ridiculous. Frome! As in Before Frome. And one day, when I decide I’ve had enough, there might be an After Frome. But only when I decide!’
It was bravado. She needed help. Look at her, in the dust with her knitting. But Frome was an excellent actor. A scorpion, whose words always stung, no matter what.
‘I don’t know, grandmother. It looks to me like Emily’s already decided for you. If you don’t want my help, I can leave.’
‘And how, pray, in the name of Scientifically Proven God, do you intend to do that, with Gretna blocking your way?’
They’d run over and over the next part. Rehearsed it to make sure their timing was perfect.
Gretna tossed Icara the keys. There was an imperceptible shifting from the Chesterfield. Louis had his hand on Frome’s shoulder.
‘Et tu Gretna…’ whispered Frome. ‘I see.’
Icara imagined she saw a tear in the old woman’s eye, but she probably only imagined it. When the tyrant next spoke, it was as if the words were travelling along Louis’ arm, by some kind of secretarial telepathy.
‘What could you possibly do to stop Emily that I can’t do myself, or haven’t tried already?’
Icara dangled Gurk’s memory stick from her finger. An empty plastic trinket now. Nothing but a bit of Belter tat. But her grandmother didn’t know that. Frome peered at the little pointed snow-globe with curiosity.
‘The Bad Memories of one Jinx Ende. He was working for Emily. It’s as good as a testimony.’
‘Jinx? The motherless son of a Brother! Wasn’t he one of the ones I took in? From the Sub-Urbs. He’d be dead without me!’ She spat and made a face as if she had swallowed a spoonful of bile.
She thought for a long time.
‘Done.’
Helena Frome didn’t know it then, but that was to be her last word.
***
The visor came down. Icara’s iRemember profile was reinstated with a ping.
The Bad Memories she remembered went where they usually go.
By the time Helena Frome realised what was happening, it was much too late.
The pens of the semi-visored Mem-Convict monks scratched and scratched. Coated in a thin, bureaucratic film, all of the Bad Memories ever remembered by iRemember were broadcast across Memorial Park, and the Tranquelle Packets of the great and the good. And the not so great. And the not so good.
***
Fergus was Frome’s entertainment arm. Which is to say he was the State, with a little more pizzazz and glitter. He had all the City’s journalists, wireless stations and scribblers for iRemember in his back-pocket. He was a man who could fit them in his back-pocket. His tremendous girth gave him presence and gravitas. It made the Citizens tune-in and pay attention. It also made Fergus prone to bouts of sweating, constantly and profusely, as though his name had just come up on the Memorial Park screens.
Most days, Fergus was well off this list. Thanks to the armies of spies and informants Frome supplied him with, he was on top of breaking news, and could pour cold water on scandals, stopping them in their tracks as efficiently as a surgeon. With as little fuss. This meant that on most days Fergus didn’t really have a need to sweat.
When he woke up on the morning of Tuesday the 11th of iRemember (the State had renamed the third month in honour of the date the software had changed their lives), it was a normal day. iRemember informed him, through the wireless when he awoke, that all was well. There were no messages. Nothing but an appointment with his barber. And breakfast, as usual, in the State Dining Room of the Glitz.
He forgot to kiss his wife goodbye.
When he arrived at the Glitz, he didn’t marvel at the decor. He didn’t give the grandiose display of gold eggs on the reception counter a second thought.
He ordered his eggs benedict. He ordered coffee. He ate a little and then switched on his enormous Tranquelle cigar vape, relishing the musty scent of this particular brand. He sent an unnecessarily passive-aggressive email to his secretary. He didn’t even finish the eggs.
He arrived at the offices of the Hourglass media agency fashionably late. His biggest problem when he arrived in the cool interior of his own office was that he was being hounded by an insurance salesman about a policy for his private pod.
He plugged in to iRemember. The walls projected an interactive version of the old Paradise Lounge, a playground for the rich and famous of the City. That no longer existed. It had closed after acres of resort had been contaminated by poisonous agricultural run-off from Tranquelle production. Fergus was old enough to recall the resort’s halcyon days. His parents had taken him there every summer. Thanks to iRemember and a few clever tech guys he could now live inside his favourite memory between meetings. He lounged in his swivel chair, wondering if there was a way to get rid of the insurance salesman.
You’re a powerful man, Fergus.
He thought he’d cracked it a week ago. But the insurance industry was desperate. And Fergus was finding out that desperate men could be very tenacious and clever. How the insurance salesman managed to get through to Fergus every time, bypassing an army of secretaries and forwarding services, he’d never know.
He was flipping his Tranquelle cigar packet over
and over between his index finger and thumb. The packet was covered, like all Tranquelle packets, in a layer of biodegradable screen. The seal of his favourite City kiosk, a replica of an old-timey tobacconist, glittered in each corner. Fergus never paid too much attention to the screen. It usually broadcast media from his own outlets when it wasn’t broadcasting the Mem-Convict screens. It was drivel and, unlike the Bureaucrats and most other ordinary Citizens, he knew it was drivel. He was in a position to know. Having commissioned it.
A thick fog of cigar smoke enveloped him.
Which all goes to show that Fergus had no idea what was coming.
***
Tranquelle packets were appearing across the City and airing nasty, scandalous secrets. The hands of Bureau workers clutched them. They made their way into the handbags of the City’s housewives; working wives; househusbands; greengrocers; chemists; the other kind of chemists; schoolteachers; teenagers; lawyers; schoolchildren; millionaires; street vendors; Superloop operators; engineers, of both the hi- and low-tech variety; pirates – both on and offline; hairdressers. Too many members of Frome’s civic body to list exhaustively here were seeing memories that, thanks to Lethene, iRemember had happily forgotten for years.
The rank numbers of the individuals being hung up to dry were slowly going up. Like the blade on a guillotine.
The memories were bad. Very bad.
Full of sex and murder and intrigue.
This was real humanity: brutal, deceitful and disgusting. The kind you can’t fake by looking at a blank screen and typing for hours. The kind that is watertight in its authenticity.
Take the case of the memory of Atticus March. A prominent councillor of Frome’s. Long-since retired, and bedridden in a home for the extremely rich and extremely elderly. His nurse was washing the back of his left thigh with a wet terry towel when she looked over at her packet of Tranquelle slims. It was an absentminded look. Soon, the heavy, wrinkled calf she was gripping slipped and fell with a soft thunk onto the bedding.
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