Atticus. March. 311 High Street West. Blood. Blood everywhere. Over the desk. How am I going to clean this up? But she’s gone. Thank Scientifically Proven God in heaven. And I can finally be free. Who would have thought that such a malnourished creature could be so full of liquid? I...I have to call someone. And stop recalling the moment the letter opener sank into her neck. It was like cooking pork.
The scene continued long after the nurse ran out of the room screaming. Could this soft downy pillow of a man be a murderer? The bad, bad memories flowed. Thick and fast. A flood of truth and crime.
Gretna and Icara had gone for a walk in the Carnival District, just as the scandal hit, like a tsunami. They watched digital fireworks exploding while iRemember went up in smoke.
It would be a shorter walk than they hoped.
The final nail in iRemember’s coffin was already coming down.
***
The phones of the Hourglass were ringing off the hook.
‘What in Scientifically Proven Hell is going on Fergus?! Do you want to know what I just saw in Memorial Park?! My Fromemass orgy in glorious Memo-colour! I’ve been trying to call the Bureau all morning, but all I get is busy tones. I want reassurance!’ screamed the Cardinal. ‘That you have this under control! That this is not wholesale! That those who paid good money for storage have not been short-changed. That we are safe! Do you hear me, Fergus? If you have screwed up I will not wait for the Scientifically Proven Judgement, so help me Scientifically Proven God! I will end you, in a blaze of righteous wrath, right here and now, you wretched, useless, scribbling lump! And I will dig up that dead bitch Frome and end her again as well!’
The Cardinal had been screaming at Fergus’ exhausted secretary, who burst into tears at the sound of the phonecall ending with a click. Fergus was long gone. Already a long way down, deep in the Sub-Urbs. Running for his life from the wrath of Big Brother, which was also Scientifically Proven.
***
Big Brother was as good as his word. Better.
Had the Temple been a ship, there would have been a rush to the lifeboats. But the Temple was not a ship. Not one that could take to the sea, at least. For the Cardinal’s Private Holy Security Committee (so serious anyone who tried to come up with a good acronym was immediately Forgotten) had been working in secret for exactly this eventuality, gently skimming the state coffers to fund their plans. Using this collected fiscal cream, the Temple had embarked on a small but successful space programme.
In the event of scandal – so, the eleventh, secret tenet of the Ten Tenets – the Temple would eject itself, freeing itself from the City and the Earth, and enter lunar orbit. There were sufficient supplies and water on board to remain at a safe distance until hostilities ceased or the rioting Citizens evolved into a new and harmless form of life.
The Cardinal had hoped it would not come to this. Now, he called the Temple to order. In the grand tradition of democraseee, they would vote on whether or not to pull the lever. And then, not unlike certain Holy chimneys in days of yore, the billowing smoke of the Temple rocket’s jet-propulsion engines would signal the decision to the Citizens, many of whom had already gathered in Memorial Square, eyes glued to the screens. Citizens who would soon be clamouring for real justice.
Big Brother had reserved a cabin for Helena Frome, as Head of State. But he had been deeply saddened to hear, that very morning, of her unfortunate demise. On the bright side, the room could now be stocked to the rafters with Bureau Bourbon. Or paper. They would vote on it. Yea, truthfully, every cloud hath a silver lining. Those are the words of Scientifically Proven God.
They voted to pull the lever.
Deep inside the City, the Temple took off, leaving bleeding corpses and a river of rubble in its wake.
***
Moments before the Temple engines whooshed into life, Lucian Ffogg came to in Emily’s transit pod. He looked down at his forearm. Because it hurt. His head felt suddenly clear. He felt cold. Complete, painful cold. His brain was a scoop of ice cream. As if someone had poured cold water through his ear canal. Someone had. There was an enormous hypodermic needle pumping something into a vein that squirmed and protested like a caught Belt viper. There was the sourness. Then came vomit.
Emily was standing over him with a phial full of Lethene Concentrate. Reviving him for the border crossing and the trial.
Lucian felt a throbbing in his temples.
And then something really nauseating happened.
‘Government employee L Ffogg,’ said Emily, in her best Bureau voice, ‘you are under arrest for the treasonous assassination of the Head of State.’
He had forgotten the past few days. He knew he had been dreaming about Emily. Suddenly, in the inside of the little black pill, with a blast from his college days hanging over him, Lucian lost the feeling of elation that the old engrams had given him.
‘There must be some kind of mistake,’ he said. ‘I’ve never assassinated a fly...’
The words froze on his lips as he remembered the impossible.
Emily gave him a pitying look. It reminded him of how she had sometimes looked at him while they were making love in his university room. This time there was no mistaking it for love. She handcuffed him, pressed a button, and let the tailgate of the little black pod slide open.
The heat and dust hit Lucian full in the face. A nasty wind pushed grit in between his teeth, and made his cheeks sting as the particles crept into the pores.
He breathed in. The desert.
‘As I said, Mr Ffogg. You are here to stand trial at the Tribunal of Brethren. The trial will be publicly transmitted. You will have a chance to tell your side of the story to the Citizens. Who, I’m sure, will be tuning in in their thousands, on their devices, and at Lethene kiosks everywhere. You’ll be a celebrity, Mr Ffogg. Tell them what happened to Lu. How he went from promising college graduate to treasonous murderer? What makes a man kill? Only you can tell them. And maybe if you show some contrition the Brethren will lessen their punishment. You will, of course, have the obligatory talk-show slot in which to tell your story. Before it...ends. The Citizens, the viewers, are waiting. You wouldn’t want to cheat them out of the show they deserve?’
Lucian Ffogg couldn’t hear her. He had looked beyond the contour of the tailgate at the City. How many times he had imagined coming here, to tell them all exactly what he thought of them. Funny that it had taken his arrest for him to finally have the chance. He put up little resistance as Emily frog-marched him into a queue. She was well-armed. With weapons that would do a lot more than just make you feel sick.
The sky was a rotten yellow above them. A smog cloud passing over from the Tranquelle Belt. Lucian looked around at the diaphanous sheets that hid the urban periphery from them. The City was a dying body, wrapped in cellophane. An eco-system on life-support. And this border was an entry point into the world of the iron lung. The piping of the Superloop like respiratory tubes. He looked at all of it now, and suddenly felt happy not to have been part of any of it. He had isolated himself, true. But so too, it seemed, had the City. The place was like a night-box in the Sub-Urbs, with a one-in-one-out policy. If it wasn’t for the strict policy, no one would want in in the first place. There were a few stifled sighs. Some people cleared their throats. Generally, when they saw the Bad Memory badge and the straitjacket, they got out of the way as if Lucian were infected. There, thought Lucian, behind that border guard with the angry scowl. There it is. Death.
He didn’t know how right he was. But for all the wrong reasons.
Am I afraid of it? Death? No. I don’t suppose I am. It’s always been coming. Like the buses before the Superloop. And just as delayed.
Just before the world went up in flames, Lucian managed one further thought. His life would have been different if Icara Swansong hadn’t flown in to Lot 458.
Something else was flying above him now. Huge an
d made of glass, it tore through the dome. A pathetic sound, like a balloon popping at a children’s party. The end of iRemember.
The crowd screamed. Rows of waiting migrants whip-turned to look at the hole in reality. Panic began to spread.
‘There’s a bomb! The insurgents! The insurgents! They’re, they’re insurge...’
The verb remained indefinite. Caught between future, past, infinitive. In the wave of the imaginary insurgents came panic. Emily watched helplessly as the crowd began to charge and thrash. The sheer force of humanity unleashed by the terror-stricken crowd tore Lucian Ffogg from her grip.
She tried to keep her eyes focused on him.
No. No. This could not be happening. This was not happening.
But he was torn away. And now it was her turn to miss him like a limb. Carried away on the current like a red plastic flower. She saw him briefly bob up, somewhere amid the rags, Tranquelle rigs, transits, hair, umbrellas, eyes, noses and mouths of the other people.
Lucian Ffogg was gone. Nothing but a memory. When she tried she found she already couldn’t recall his face.
Emily hardly felt the shoulders shove and push her. She hardly felt the fingers that would leave bruises. She saw but did not see the border guards as they tried to chorale the panicking migrants. She sank to her knees in the dust. Into a mire of her own disbelief. Fused to the spot. Watching the City she had almost been appointed ruler of deflating like a soap bubble.
The border guards had put up some tape. Do not cross. But had found themselves tearing through it themselves and running in the opposite direction when the Temple went up. Run! Screamed invisible mouths. As far away as possible from the City. People who had been close enough to the border to get in before the Temple took off were coming out in small, frightened huddles, then dispersing like sad firecrackers made of skin, bone and dreams.
Desert winds toyed with the tatters of fabric. Tendrils of tarpaulin, making flapping sounds in the air. Exposed to the elements, like the dream in a shattered snow-globe, or a memory in a rapidly heating stick of Bioware, everything under the dome was already parching and beginning to crumble to dust.
The Ending:
Desert
The first ending
The clerics were the first in the history of the planet with the poor fortune to actually meet their maker.
Head on.
The Goddess had not been Scientifically Proven. No one in a lab coat had even bothered to try. And she was not happy.
Look at the Brethren, she thought. They are craven, greedy, and full of hate. They worship nothing. Not even themselves. Every time I give them another chance. And every time I’m disappointed. You know what they say. Fool me once.
The Goddess – who, when you looked at her from a certain angle, looked like a desert made of kinetic sand – watched the rocket of Brethren taking off into outer space, and beginning its orbit. She resolved to smite them.
One of the enormous jet engines exploded. The others jumped ship after it.
***
It rained shrapnel.
The second ending
How is Lucian Ffogg?
Where is Lucian Ffogg?
He’s not at liberty to say.
He couldn’t say if he wanted to. He’s lost. Wandering around in the desert, where he has been deposited by the tide of humanity fleeing the City.
A family of Belters took pity on him and gave him a ride to Desert Ring 2 in their transit pod. They wanted to go further, but all vehicles, even efficient ones, run out of fuel eventually.
It’s a Scientifically Proven Miracle he’s still alive. Baked by the scorching sun.
He doesn’t know it, but he is crunching across the place where Lot 458 once stood. Emily’s goons have left a little bit of fencing. There’s a ‘Keep Out’ sign too. Lucian Ffogg is a resourceful man. He rights the fragment of fence, straightens the sign. Stands behind it, as if his body remembers that this is where he ought to be.
The false memory implanted by Emily Swansong has cannibalised its neighbours. Soon it will turn on itself and there will be nothing left. Lucian no longer remembers the first time he met Icara Swansong. Or the plane that carried her into the desert at 25,000 feet. Nor his time as the alleged Off-Gridder ring-leader. The creator of Lethene has been swallowed by the Blue Lagoon. He has found the oblivion he sought. His past no longer belongs to him. It belongs to History. Finally, he doesn’t even remember Gurk Caplan.
Around him echo the sounds of the desert at sunset.
The desert is welcoming him back into its dusty embrace. Emily Swansong may have been his first love. The desert will be his last. At least the desert will kill him by accident.
As night falls he watches what he thinks is a shooting star, though it’s a little larger than they normally are.
This – he thinks – as he picks up the sand and plays with it between his fingers.
This is my God.
The last ending
The two friends walked. They passed a burned-out Tranquelle transit a long way down the road. They hoped it wasn’t the Dowager Countess. There was no sign of Steve.
There was no sign of Emily Swansong either. But Gretna and Icara weren’t looking for her.
They walked, without a compass for direction. With a burning City behind you, there is only one direction to walk in. They walked for miles, as day turned to night.
They hailed a transit pod. It whirred along on autopilot. For a while they thought it would take them to the Viccies’ hide-out. But it must have been a different pod for it spat them out somewhere in Desert Ring 2.
There was no iRemember to record what they said and did, so the best we can do is imagine it.
Imagine that they talked about the past. That they couldn’t believe that they’d finally done it. That it was a pity the City had self-destructed in the end. That no one had been brought to trial.
Imagine that they passed various groups of stragglers, walking, staring into space or sleeping by the roadside. That they found an abandoned refrigeration transit, full of food and water. It must have been bound for the kitchens of the Glitz before its driver left in a panic. Imagine that they ate everything it contained, stole anything in it worth stealing, and saved some for later.
That they saw dust.
And yucca.
Some stones marking the entrances to Off-Gridder tunnels.
But mostly the emptiness of the desert.
When they’d walked far enough, they saw what they thought was a mirage of a man, squatting on the broken earth. He ignored them and let them pass by. He was at peace. The way only a mirage can be.
Imagine that they talked about what they would do now that there was no Bureau. No Temple. No Frome. And there were likely no more memories. Would the Off-Gridders in their tunnels rise up and inherit the earth? There wasn’t much left to inherit.
They would have to make the world anew. How would they build it without iRemember? What would they base it on? There were more questions than answers. There usually are when you have to start over again. But as well as questions, there were possibilities.
Maybe the City would rise again from the dust, worse than it had ever been.
Or, just possibly, Icara Swansong had won.
And maybe it wouldn’t.
The future stretched before them like a desert. Something like a future. The chattering of the past in the iRemember servers was silent.
Acknowledgements
This is the part where iRemember all the people who helped this book on its journey, from conception somewhere deep in my subconscious, to its final destination: the actual world. It hasn’t been an easy journey, and both the book and me, it’s author, have been carried for most of it by impossibly kind, impossibly generous, and overly understanding people. They all deserve so much more than a few words for their help. And maybe one
day I’ll be able to give it to them. In the meantime, my heartfelt thanks go to...
Clio Mitchell, a truly great editor without whom iRemember would never have seen the light of day. She saw the potential in a manuscript called ‘Lucian Ffogg and the Impossible Memory’ and was not afraid to embark on helping that manuscript reach said potential. No matter how many rewrites it took to get it there! Clio seemed to somehow understand exactly what I wanted to say before I’d even thought of it, and wasn’t daunted by the...quirkiness...of some of my early choices, relating to character, plot, and maybe especially typography. Thank you for making such a gruelling process such fun. The readers will be even more grateful to you, I’m sure, for whipping the story into shape.
Special thanks also go to Dan Hiscocks, who was willing to take a chance on a new voice, as well as Simon Edge and all the other lovely people at Lightning Books, for letting me realise a childhood dream and helping me through the maze of publishing, full of frightening and unfamiliar minotaurs like contracts, blurbs, and author bios.
I’d like to thank Ruksha Bhadresha, my lifelong friend and supporter of my many pipe dreams, who was the first to read iRemember, in a protean form, as well as all of my previous attempts at literature from the age of about ten onwards. Each time I handed her the mammoth task of proofreading endless numbers of pages. And each time she put her life on hold and did it. Thank you doesn’t cut it!
I am endlessly grateful to Mara Arts who also read and commented on an early version of iRemember, and another unrelated manuscript, all while writing her own thesis! I asked so much of you, and you gave your time and effort so willingly.
I’m grateful too to Elisa and Sigrid. Our research group meetings were such a source of inspiration on cities. And to all my Paulina friends and Stephen (my support network), I’d like to say thank you so much. Your friendship and humour have meant a lot to me when I was writing but also at those times when I struggled to write anything at all.
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