by Tim Scott
“You haven’t worked it out at all, have you?” he said eventually, as the murmured laughter faded, and I could see he was still reveling in the pleasure of having me so neatly under his thumb. Then, without any kind of warning, I felt something give deep inside my head, as if it was crumbling under the sheer intensity of this moment. “You disappoint me, Jonny X. Honestly. You were so adamant about it beforehand.”
But I hardly heard him, because my brain felt like it was running with the same thick treacle that had been dripping and slopping about when we’d been surfing. There was a warm, dull, distant ache near the crown of my head. A tiny cracking sound ran through my skull as my eyes defocused, and I was overwhelmed by vivid slabs of memories from the past few days coming to the fore, then sliding away from my consciousness, like the ice shelves calved off a glacier. Huge, knifelike crevasses cut through the very sense of who I was. I had a heart-burning, tearing sensation that a foreign part of me was careering through my mind, grasping an older me by the collar, trying to drag it free from this melee before it was totally crushed and lost.
“I did this,” I said, before I had even been aware of knowing it, and the words sat neatly on the heavy silence that felt like it had piled up thickly across the floor, as though having some strange, liquid quality. I realized my mind was working in a very weird way to be thinking like this. “I did it all,” I went on almost automatically, knowing somehow it was incontrovertibly true, but still not understanding any of it.
“Oh, bravo!” cried Habakkuk, exploding with sarcasm as he began clapping alone, so that the noise of each clap echoed, bald and naked. “Bravo, Mr. X. Give that man a banana!”
“I got them to steal my house, I put the Riders after me, and I got those encyclopedia salespeople to come after me too. It was me, wasn’t it?”
“Top of the class! For a moment there you had me worried. Bravo!” he cried, still clapping. “But you always like to think you have something up your sleeve, don’t you, Mr. X?”
“Why did I do it, Habakkuk? And where the fuck has my memory gone?” I added, realizing I was sounding too much like a child who had lost a favorite toy.
“Come, come! This is a party. See?” he said, gesturing to the balconies of people—and for the first time I properly took in that there were streamers and balloons hooked over the balustrades and hanging gaily from the ceiling. “We even have fireworks,” he added.
My mind kicked sideways. “Jonny and Mat, please don’t be late for the party!” I thought, remembering the words and pulling the card out of my pocket. I had picked it off the exit door on the Thin Building. They had just been toying with me, playing me like some dumb animal.
“The prodigal son has returned to the scene of the crime,” he cried, mixing his metaphors like a cheap cocktail. “I’ll see you later. You have some things to tell me. In the meantime, enjoy yourself!” And he backed away from the balcony, setting alight a low, excited murmur in the bulging crowd. But that didn’t feel right; it didn’t make sense to get drawn into all this without getting any kind of answers.
“Now, Habakkuk! Why don’t we have the answers now, so everyone can hear them?” I shouted, but he brushed aside this comment with a limp waft of his right hand and a too-smug smile and began to leave. I don’t even remember thinking about it; I simply drew the gun and there was a confusing sense of déjà vu about the whole moment, as though I had done this a million times before, so that I felt like a detached observer to my own actions. The gun was satisfyingly cool in my hand, and I carefully leveled it at him. It would be crazy to shoot, I said to myself. It would be the end of me, I must not do it, but my personality seemed frighteningly split, and I heard the jolt of the explosion crack around the atrium, echoing bluntly off the hard stone walls like a thin, wild cat skulking about maniacally to find a way to freedom.
Habakkuk wavered, and I was convinced he would fall in an easy swallow dive to the floor, felled like a deadweight; but he rode the moment, then glanced back, alert and brisk, as he watched the glowing parachute of the purple fireworks drop, lazily smoking down into the atrium until his eyes rested on me.
I had the gun in hand, still aimed directly at his head. I couldn’t have fired the thing at all, I realized. It had simply been fireworks excitedly ignited by someone in the crowd. Habakkuk stared in my direction now with a hard, cold, pinpoint glare that had no human warmth to it at all.
“No real bullets in the guns anyway, Mr. X,” he said with a quiet, flat, dull expression. “They were all fake; all of them. You arranged it. You planned it. Fire as much as you want. You won’t hit a thing.” The triumphal edge to his voice had completely gone now, and his tone was flat and serious, as though we had moved into an arena he had hoped to avoid.
I swung around and pointed the gun at an oversized ornamental vase that stood on a plinth not five yards away and pulled the trigger. There was a much louder, ear-cracking spit from the gun, and the noise bounded around the atrium, running up and down the walls until it exhausted itself and died.
But the vase didn’t so much as wobble.
“You want something from me, Habakkuk. You have to explain here and now, or we’re leaving. And you won’t find me again. I promise that.”
I was clutching at straws so furiously that I might have snatched enough to build a haystack and perhaps some rather fetching corn dollies, but the idea of me leaving seemed to hit a raw nerve and he hesitated. I saw his weaselly eyes dart about, and his head was alive with sharp, angular movements. It occurred to me that, whatever he wanted, it must be pretty important.
“It’s your party,” he said, turning back and breaking into a thin smile to cover his nervousness. “We’ll play whatever game you want. What would you like to hear? Let’s see…how about that you caught a virus that affected your head and overwrote your memory?”
“I caught a disease?” I said, momentarily stunned into almost mute confusion.
“Exactly! Your fake past is just a disease that you caught, but once under its grip your mind was controlled by it. You’ll recover; your body will build up an immunity to the virus and the disease will die, leaving your memory as it was before. It will take you another twenty-four hours, I should think, before your mind is back to normal.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, knowing that if part of my memory had been overwritten in some way, it would explain everything. It would explain why so many of my memories seemed paper-thin and insubstantial; why I’d been plagued by the uncomfortable feeling that I had lost track of who I was, as though my real self had deserted me and just left a mush of papier-mâché in its place.
“What else would you like to hear, Mr. X? That you invented it? That you wanted to try it out first of all, along with a collection of volunteers?” He was warming to his theme again, reveling in his role like a circus ringmaster. “The Dream Virus Project. A waking dream that you catch like a disease, but which can only infect you if your DNA has been written into the virus. Sound familiar, Mr. X?”
My mind was torn apart, a side of me knowing this was the truth, but finding nothing in my head that could verify it. I furiously riffled through my mind, like a burglar plundering a filing cabinet, tossing papers over his shoulder, but there was nothing tangible to be found. Just file after file of blank white pages, and all the time I had a growing unease about Habakkuk.
“Then that file about the Dream Virus was all true?” I managed.
“Mostly. Yes.” Habakkuk was confidently tapping down the stairs toward me, with the crowd silently slipping in behind him, like some weird cult procession. “You see, you wanted to give yourself plenty of clues to the truth; you wanted to find out how successfully the disease would work. Just how much of a trigger would it take to make you remember. As you can see, it worked so well, you remember almost nothing.”
“So who were the Riders, then?”
“Come on, Jonny!” said Habakkuk, snapping across the floor to meet me with a shake of the head as the atriu
m filled with people. “Don’t you understand? They were all your friends. All these people here,” he said, gesturing around. “You wrote each one of them a separate Dream Virus. They all had their own false memories, so each would play a part in your…experiment. It took you a full year to plan. Trays and trays of glass phials, each with a separate Dream Virus. Don’t you remember?”
“‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’” said Teb quietly, and I looked around at him wondering what planet he was coming from now, but Habakkuk wasn’t done.
“Jonny X. You must see it, surely?” he said, putting his arm stiffly on my shoulder in a gesture I was meant to take as friendliness.
I stared at him, and I did see it. I saw it all.
The crowd was swarming into the atrium now, bunching around us, glasses filled with champagne, all with smiles of concern and excitement, each trying to catch my eye with an “it’s all true” raise of the eyebrows.
I looked around and saw the bouncers from Inconvenient; the Zone Securities policemen; the mad guy from the encyclopedia offices; Sarah, my ex-wife who was probably not my ex-wife at all; the Belgian assassin; even the Father Christmas sleigh driver. And as I turned farther, there, up on the balcony, I saw Caroline, all alone, staring down on the crowd.
“So there never was such a thing as a limpet encyclopedia salesperson?” I said, still staring up at her, and she looked back with an easy, gentle smile. Someone in the crowd chuckled, and said something like:
“You got it, Jonny. That was all your idea.” And then I felt myself loosening up. What the hell was I worried about Habakkuk for? I had set this up; it was all my doing. I had masked my own memories with a disease, and soon I would get those memories back. And if I had been worried about Habakkuk, I would have put in some kind of safety net to catch myself. These people were all my friends, and I had written them each a different past so they could be part of my crazy adventure, only they had got their real memories back before I did, for some reason. Perhaps I had deliberately given myself, Mat, and Teb a stronger version of the virus, one I felt was too risky to expose everyone else to.
Caroline was still staring down at me, and I felt my heart smack into the pit of my stomach. I pushed through the crowd, making for the stairs, and she tilted her head quizzically, just as she had done the first time we had met when she had dropped from the helicopter.
Her eyes cut right through me, and I felt a thickness in my throat and a coolness on the back of my neck. I jumped up the stairs, not caring how public this was, and swung around onto the balcony, where she still stood, almost hovering, it seemed, stunningly alive and calm and set well apart from the madness and small-mindedness that seemed to infect people like Habakkuk. I stared into her blue eyes, which swam with the deep color of a vast summer sky in the warm, tender moments before sunset, and I drank in the soft, unbending pleasure of it all.
“Forgive me,” I whispered, and touched her lightly on the cheek. She nodded almost imperceptibly, as though I had given her the answer to a question she had been asking herself.
“Welcome back, Jonny X,” she said, with the smallest of smiles, which nevertheless transformed her face. “You nearly remembered our anniversary. That’s pretty impressive, you know.” I didn’t even try to think what she meant by that, because I was on fire with emotion, so I just took her soft, warm cheeks between my hands and kissed her.
Fireworks exploded about us, as some romantic smart-ass set them off, and the moment sent another sweet spiral of adrenaline ripping through me. The crowd let off cries of surprise and squeals of shock amid the flashes and cracks, as the fireworks coughed smoke and spat sparks, dangerously close to highly expensive office electrical equipment, but no one seemed to care.
And then, as I held her close, I saw a faint change knock the softness from her eyes, as if she had suddenly remembered something. She leaned over and spoke above the noise of the firecrackers. “You never wrote me a virus, did you realize? I was the safety net. You called me your guardian angel and I followed you everywhere, but Habakkuk never knew; he thought my memory was overwritten like everyone else’s.”
My throat dried and a shiver dropped through me like a shovelful of gravel. Although I had sensed this, I hadn’t put it into thought, but it explained so much about her actions. But far more worryingly, it set alight a forest of uneasiness about Habakkuk again. Why had I thought I would need Caroline as a safety net? I scoured the atrium floor and just caught a glimpse of his shining head, reflecting the blue showers of the fireworks as he slipped away to his office.
“You know who all my friends are?” I said above the noise of the firecrackers, trying to get my feet back onto the ground.
“Of course.”
“Good. Come on, introduce me. I want to talk to them all.” We headed toward the stairs and a particularly insistent, whizzing sort of fireworks cracked off the balcony near us like a cornered squirrel with its tail on fire.
I grabbed up a couple of glasses of champagne from a white-linened table near the balustrade at the bottom, touched Caroline’s arm and handed one to her. We made a silent toast, for a moment dropping away from the splutter and madness of the firecrackers. I looked into her eyes and the white-hot sparks of love I felt inside for this girl seemed to burst across the whole sky and scorch the well-manicured lawns outside in line after line of smoldering grass. And then we were engulfed in a barrage of slaps on the back and hugs of congratulations as the crowd swooped down on the pair of us.
I shook hands and laughed and thanked them all as we bundled our way over to Teb and Mat. Caroline poked fun at them, because they couldn’t remember who she was at all and consequently were way too polite. I just smiled with a sense of relief, excitement, and pride in this girl, but with a feeling too that I was trying to cover a nervousness that lurked inside of me like a lungful of bees.
As Caroline explained, Mat, Teb, and I were close friends, exactly as our memories had it, and, I hadn’t ever doubted it would be any different; the feelings I had for the two were too solid and strong to be something manufactured on a computer. We drank a glass or two and mingled with the ever-growing crowd, sliding among the little groups. I met so many of my friends all over again for the first time in a flurry of handshakes, spilled drinks, congratulations, and red-cheeked, alcohol-driven laughter. I had stepped outside my own life, and now I was getting it all back in one gigantic spoonful.
Sarah was there, flaxen-haired and laughing, explaining how she was my sister, regaling me with tales of growing up and family holidays. Eli was my first girlfriend, she said, divorced now but happy, with two fantastic children. She explained how we had kept in touch all this time, and knew each other back to front. We often wondered in drunken moments what would have happened if we had stayed together and ridden out the fires of teenage frustrations that had split us apart all those years ago.
The Belgian assassin was a surf mate called Luke, whom we had got to know sitting in the line up at Steamers; and one of the Riders really was called Jeff, and I had studied dream architecture with him at UCSC. He said we’d spent many reckless nights together, getting drunk and taking too many raw dreams that frazzled our heads. The last few days were like remembering a foreign holiday when you are back at work, he explained; the excitement and vibrant memories were being smothered by the mind-numbing familiarity of everything you thought, just for a moment, you had left behind forever.
He wanted to know the details of the virus and how it came about, but I couldn’t tell him anything with my memory still wiped, then he started on about what was going to happen with the Dream Virus Project next.
It was like being kicked heavily in the stomach by a wild horse.
When you reach the top of a mountain, you have to remember amid the lash of explosive excitement at seeing the view that actually you’re only halfway there, and it doesn’t count for anything if you don’t make it back down. And right now, I suddenly realized, I was only halfw
ay there.
A band kicked off, careering into a wild, guitar-fueled song that was pitted with neat tunes and surprising harmonies, and after a few bars I could see that the noise would make it impossible to hear anything else, so I made an “it’s too loud to hear” sort of gesture, shook Jeff’s hand, and wound my way out of the crowd to the edges of the atrium, where I could think.
I found a quiet spot in the shadows, perched on a marble edging to a small raised garden area containing some manicured plants and an acacia tree. It was very weird seeing all these people talk about stuff that ran so completely contrary to the memories I held about them. My mind told me to run like fuck from someone like Jeff, but he was as gentle as anything, and the whole experience made reality seem incredibly brittle.
But either way, I realized I still had a nervousness about Habakkuk lying tightly curled somewhere inside me, and I had to sort it out. What was to become of the Dream Virus Project? A person could control pretty much anyone else in the world if they had their DNA; they could change all of their memories—which meant not just altering their hopes and desires a bit, but transforming their whole selves. This thing could whack away a person’s character overnight. I had given myself a pretty tame dose; I had still known Teb and Mat and Santa Cruz, come to that. But what if you scrubbed everything and gave someone a memory that overwrote a whole new past? What if you gave them a virus from which the body could never recover? Would they start to live another life, unaware of everything that had gone before? Would they believe a lot of fake memories someone had written on a computer about who they actually were? My mind fought over this, spinning it around, watching the alarming, monstrous possibilities of it all. If the technology of the waking Dream Virus got out, it would mean people in small rooms could play God, and their victims would never even be consciously aware they had been hit.