by Al Robertson
‘I haven’t been rewritten, Ambrose. I’m still me. I still love Dieter. And we need to get back there and save him.’
‘STOP FUCKING SAYING THAT!’ he roared. His throat pushed against the knife. A thin line of blood appeared.
Leila wondered about using the skull face to stun him. But that would only confirm his sense of her as an enemy. She had to try and talk him round.
‘Oh, stop it, Leila,’ he continued. ‘Admit what you are.’ He groaned. ‘My father tried to help me. Told me what to do. I didn’t do it and now here you are and I have to face you. Stupid, stupid, stupid me.’
‘Ambrose, your father wasn’t really here,’ Leila said desperately. ‘Someone else was. Something else. I’ve had a visit too.’ A single bead of blood rolled down Ambrose’s throat. Leila had no way of getting the knife off him. ‘I crashed back to my flat. A pressure man came and tried to rewrite my past. Make me believe that I’d accepted Dieter’s true death.’ It was difficult to tell if Ambrose was taking any of it in. ‘That I didn’t love him. That I had no reason to save him.’ Ambrose’s eyes were glazed. Leila imagined his glitched mind reaching for memories that were no longer there.
‘But we can’t save Dieter. There’s so little of him left.’
Now it was Leila’s turn to shout. ‘Don’t say that!’ Then, more quietly: ‘It’s not true. We’re going to get Dieter back, Ambrose. You and me together.’ She was near tears. ‘And you’ve lost part of yourself. We’ll get that back too.’ Guilt shot through her. ‘If all this is anyone’s fault, it’s mine.’
‘You’re so convincing,’ he said, wonder in his voice. ‘I almost believe you.’
Another shout: ‘Yes!’ Then, desperately: ‘Yes, do believe me. Because it’s the truth, dammit. I’m not working for Deodatus. I’m not trying to force anything on you. I’m just telling you the truth. Can’t you see it? Wouldn’t you rather it was this way?’
‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘I would.’ The knife dropped away from his throat.
Leila sighed with relief. She was getting through to him at last. She wondered if she’d be able to get him out of the building. They needed somewhere to hide. She couldn’t take him back to her flat. Perhaps she could get them into one of the properties she’d shown recently. She remembered the block she’d shown the awful couple around, when her life was so different. That would still be empty.
‘I’ve got somewhere we could go,’ she said. ‘Somewhere safe.’
Ambrose stared at the knife. ‘That would be good,’ he replied. ‘Fresh air. The world outside. Get away from this shithole.’ He looked up at Leila. ‘Do you know how much I hate living here? I’ve made the best of it, but still.’ He sighed heavily. ‘You make stupid, stupid mistakes when you’re young. My father told me that, when he came. He was talking to me again, at last. But you’re saying that wasn’t really him?’
‘No, Ambrose.’ He was finally listening to her. ‘It was a pressure man. Come on, Ambrose. I can take you somewhere safe. And then we can go back to the city and rescue Dieter.’
Ambrose took a deep breath. ‘He told me you’d say that. Exactly that. To try and get close to me. To find a way of rewriting me. And he told me how to avoid it.’ He suddenly looked happy, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. ‘The past is such a beautiful place. You, still yourself. The Lazarus Crew still together. And further back – before I fucked up – even better.’ He ran his thumb down the knife’s edge. There was red there too. The blade was very sharp. ‘It’s all I have left.’
‘Oh, no,’ breathed Leila.
‘And I’m going back there. Just like Cormac did.’
‘No!’ Instinct sent her leaping towards him, even though there was nothing she could do.
With a quick, liquid flick of his wrist, Ambrose lifted the blade and sliced it across his own neck, starting beneath his left ear and pushing hard all the way round. Blood leapt out in a fine spray. The knife clattered to the floor. He fell sideways, choking. His head thumped down on to the table. Leila was on him, pressing her hands up against the wound, but they passed through it and she felt the pain of being a ghost, unable to save the living. Ambrose gurgled – a low, hopeless sound. His eyes were glazed. He slowly rolled on to the floor. A red pool grew around him, the brightest thing in that bleached, hopeless room.
‘Oh,’ breathed Leila. ‘Ambrose.’
Pain and loss seared through her. She took a step back, then another, then she was in the hallway, then the office. She put a hand to her face and found tears. There was too much loss in her world. She thought of jumping back home, but seeing Dit would only remind her of all that she’d failed to protect. She thought of jumping to Cassiel, but then imagined finding that the mind too had been rewritten. She couldn’t bear another encounter like that. Her friends, too, would remember different yesterdays. For a second she despaired, feeling that she had nobody to turn to. Then she remembered the past she’d tried so hard to write out of her own life.
Now it was all that remained to her.
It was time to return to the Coffin Drives.
She closed her eyes and let herself fall into the land of the dead.
Chapter 16
Leila came back to herself lying on her side, with her eyes shut. She hadn’t specified an arrival location, so she’d been brought to the Coffin Drives’ default entry point – Memory Park, the round open space at their very heart. Short grass tickled her face and neck, its fresh, green smell rising up around her. Sunlight warmed her skin. Birds poured out their liquid songs. The last time she’d woken here she’d been lying in a cot in a triage tent, recovering from the Blood and Flesh plague. Memories rose up and filled her mind.
The day of the attack had begun innocently enough. Back then, Leila was still a relatively contented inhabitant of the Coffin Drives. She rose, summoning memories of coffee, imagining different ways of spending the day. She took a sip from the mug that appeared in her hand and went to the window, wondering if any fresh architectures had been scrawled across the city overnight. But nothing had changed. Everything was quiet, everything was still. That was surprising. In such a fluid city, stasis was an aberration.
Then the plague hit her.
First, it took her senses. Touch vanished, then taste. The coffee in her mouth lost all heat. Its bitterness disappeared. She gasped. Her mouth was empty. Security blinds crashed down. The room went dark. She called out for emergency lighting. Nothing happened. Hearing collapsed. She was an isolated consciousness, unable to perceive anything beyond itself.
Shit, she thought. Be cool. Local crash. Been through this before.
Her security systems howled in disagreement. They registered a major personal integrity threat. Defence librarians raced through her memories, throwing up barricades against the aggressor. One by one, they vanished. Leila had a sense of a vast, chaotic force breaking over her like a wave. She withdrew deep into herself. Her remaining librarians rushed to pull deep trivia into a hard, disposable protective shield. Then they frantically pulled the irreplaceable memories that defined her true self in behind it and scrambled to back them up.
Leila felt something like corporeal experience return as those memories drifted through her mind. She jumped from moment to moment, forced to relive them in random order. It was a profoundly unsettling experience. Part of her was aware that she was a fetch, under heavy and very personal attack. Part of her was a twenty-year-old in a bar, then a two-year-old spending her first night in a grown-up bed, then a thirteen-year-old running through long grass. Her sense of self began to fragment. Without any specifically helpful past experiences to stabilise her, fear blossomed.
It became panic when the trivia shield was breached. Her defences vanished. The intruder tore into her, ripping her past to pieces. It attacked coherence, taking individual moments – I’m awake I’m in bed I’m sad here’s mummy I’m happy I’m sleepy – and breaking them d
own into units that made no sense – I’m mummy sleepy awake bed in sad I’m I’m I’m. It was like watching a tsunami racing up beach after beach, overwhelming an entire archipelago of islands.
She lost her sense of her real age. She was absolutely twelve, then three, then seventeen, then ten. Each moment was suffused with a suffocating dread. Then the moment would break, the tsunami taking it, and she would instantly be elsewhen. Every key memory of her life was held up, examined and torn to shreds. She lived them all as a great howl of panic and loss. An immeasurable period passed and the destruction passed a tipping point, breaking her sense of self. Leila no longer knew who or what she was. There was only agony. There was no sense of time, and so the agony stretched out to fill eternity.
The virus ate a substantial proportion of the Coffin Drives before a combined Fetch/Totality initiative was able to stop it. In real terms, the whole attack only took a few seconds. Many of those affected were lost for good. Leila was one of the lucky ones. Her librarians managed to save a substantial proportion of her memories. As soon as Dieter cleared enough digital space for her, she left the Coffin Drives and moved in with him in Docklands. She thought about purging all remembrance of the attack, but settled for just repressing it. It seemed to be the human thing to do.
The past finished pulsing through her. Leila was panting with stress. She was filled with an urge to fly back up into Homelands. But there was no safety there. She reminded herself that she needed to be in the Coffin Drives. She would recover herself and then work out how to rescue Dieter before he lost any more of himself. She forced herself to breathe slowly and felt herself calm. She wasn’t quite ready to open her eyes yet. She sat up, hands clutching at the soft grass. She still felt tense. And yet it seemed to be such a beautiful day. A soft, fresh breeze tickled her face. Sunlight warmed her skin. Birds sang. There was a stream somewhere nearby. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes again.
The park was as it always had been. The skyline beyond it was still a jumble of buildings. Without moving her eyes she could see a cathedral built of stained glass, a black leather skyscraper, a brightly painted pagoda, a hundred-metre-high granite henge and a giant yellow elephant, dotted across with windows and terraces. She watched for a few minutes, expecting some of the buildings to shiver out of existence and others to appear, but there was no change. The city was more fixed than she’d ever seen it. That, too, helped her relax. Order was so comforting.
‘Things have settled down since you were here last.’
Leila turned.
The speaker squatted just behind her. Short, iron-grey hair framed a face that looked like it had been carved out of a walnut. The old woman wore a loose shirt, trousers and no shoes. Strong toes gripped the grass, giving her stance a deep firmness. Her eyes and mouth were entirely black. It was the Fetch Counsellor. ‘After the Blood and Flesh incident,’ she continued, ‘we all needed a little stability.’
‘The buildings don’t change anymore?’ asked Leila.
‘Not very often. Do you want to take a look round?’
‘I’m not here to be a tourist.’
‘I thought not.’ The Counsellor’s voice was very serious. ‘You’re here for help.’
Leila opened up her recent memories to the Fetch Counsellor. As the Counsellor experienced her last few days, Leila too thought back over them. So much had assaulted her and those close to her. Here in these quiet gardens it seemed impossible that it had all really happened. And yet Docklands was now so dangerously unpredictable that the Coffin Drives felt almost like a refuge. Leila looked around and shivered, remembering how broken she’d been when Dieter signed her out of the triage centre. Almost a refuge, but not quite.
The Fetch Counsellor was pale. ‘This is terrible,’ she said. ‘I knew that fetches could be rewritten. But the living too – that’s shocking news. I’m so sorry you had to go through it all.’
‘Deodatus hasn’t tried to break in here?’
‘We’ve had some unexplained presences.’ The Counsellor looked worried. ‘Shadows in the sea. Lights in the sky. Too fleeting, too distant for us to scan properly. But nothing in the city itself. I think he’s watching from afar. But he must know how good our security is. For now, he’s holding back.’
‘And what if he’s inside you and you just don’t know it?’
The Fetch Counsellor smiled. ‘Then you’d be surrounded by flies and your memory would already have been rewritten.’
The thought shocked Leila. ‘Gods.’
‘But for the moment at least, whatever Dieter’s working on doesn’t seem to be a direct threat to the Coffin Drives.’
Leila raised an eyebrow. ‘He said he could be building an army.’
‘And we are the discorporate dead. An army would have to prioritise the physical forces of the Pantheon and the Totality before taking us on. Besides, Dieter doesn’t need one to damage us. If he chose to attack us head on he could break us using software alone.’ She looked around. The peaceful afternoon drifted on obliviously around them. ‘But we shouldn’t talk in an open space like this. Let me take you somewhere more private.’
The Fetch Counsellor led Leila through the Memory Park. Relax, Leila told herself. It’s all in the past. She found herself feeling more and more nervous as they approached the gates to the city. Everything’s changed. It’s safer, now. She remembered how scared Ambrose had been when he’d accompanied her to the Shining City, and how he’d overcome his fear, and felt both guilty and inspired. But when they stepped through the gate and into the streets beyond, her own fear was still there.
‘Get yourself ready,’ the Fetch Counsellor told her. ‘We’re about to switch channels.’
All of a sudden, the city changed. The skyscrapers, the henges, the silver statues and the cathedrals vanished. Streets bounded by long, low, endless walls flowed into being around them. Each wall was studded with hundreds of doors, and each door was completely different from any of the others.
‘That was meant to happen, right?’ Leila looked round nervously. ‘Where’s the rest of it gone?’
‘Oh, it’s still there,’ the Fetch Counsellor reassured her. ‘We’ve just changed how we look at it. We’ve moved into the Memory Channel.’
‘I think that’s after my time.’ She forced her breathing to slow again.
‘I’m sorry.’ The Counsellor smiled. ‘It is. I should have explained it before we switched. After you left, we started grouping fetches by the kind of afterlives they wanted to lead. When a group’s big enough, it gets its own channel to fill with content. This is one of them.’
‘Who does it belong to?’
‘People who want to look back over their lives. Enjoy the good bits, come to terms with the hard times. They hold on to a lot of memories and they like to keep them safe. So, the Memory Channel’s built on some of the most stable storage space we have. Multiple backups, deep security. They value privacy, too. Once we’re through our own particular door, nobody’ll be able to listen in on us. Let’s go find it.’
‘I didn’t know about any of this,’ said Leila as they walked. Regret surprised her. Perhaps she should have stayed more in touch with the evolution of the Fetch Communion. ‘All this was because of the attack?’
The Fetch Counsellor nodded. ‘At first we mistook chaos for freedom. Then the plague came. It helped us realise that freedom and structure are not opposites, that we needed some coherence to make our society safer and more resilient. The channels are part of that.’
Leila followed the Counsellor through the maze of doors, imagining all the different fetches who might be lying behind them, remembering. It was difficult to tell how far they’d actually come when the Counsellor exclaimed: ‘Ah! There it is.’ She steered them towards a medium-sized metal door. It was painted red and studded with rivets. ‘Our destination.’
It opened, and they stepped into a great wooden hallway. ‘It�
��s bigger on the inside,’ commented the Counsellor. ‘It has to be, to hold all the memories.’ Stairways twisted up through tens of storeys of balconies towards a gloomily distant ceiling. Long, low-ceilinged rooms stretched off to the left and right, stuffed full of trunks, cupboards and other storage systems. There was a table and two chairs in the centre of the hall. They faced a stuffed ostrich, a little wooden trike and two giant six-sided dice, a metre across on each side.
‘Wow,’ said Leila. ‘That’s pretty random.’
‘Meaning is a very subjective thing. They have a lot of significance for the woman I’m riding. This house is a kind of time machine for her.’
‘You can access her memories?’
‘To an extent. But we’re not here to discuss her.’
Fear was still coiled within Leila, a barbed thing wrapped tight around her mind and heart. ‘I need a moment.’
‘Oh, of course. I completely understand.’ She pointed at the wall ahead of them. It opened to show a softly-lit, white-walled room, furnished with a rug, a sofa and an armchair. The far wall was half cloudscape, half warm blue sky. ‘A Memory Channel contemplation chamber. One of the safest, most private places we have. Take as long as you need.’
On the edge of the room, Leila turned back. ‘I’m glad to be here,’ she said, ‘but doesn’t the owner mind us using her home like this?’
‘Not at all,’ replied the Counsellor. ‘She volunteered to be ridden. And if she knew you were here now, using this space to renew yourself, she’d be overjoyed.’
In the end, Leila only spent a few minutes in the contemplation chamber. She held the pendant in her hand, reminding herself of all that was stake. As the ambient dread that the Coffin Drives sparked in her settled, she felt the potential of loss move her to action.
The Counsellor was ensconced in an armchair. ‘That was quick,’ she said as Leila emerged. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’