by Tim Scott
She barely saw the streets slip by; barely saw the crowds on the drenched sidewalks, the posters, the hawkers and sellers, the bedraggled skyline of skyscrapers, each with tethered advertising balloons bobbing in the wind and their sides a maelstrom of pinprick-white lights star-bursting through the evening gloom, proclaiming the merits of some must-have, must-buy, must-show-off item.
Her eyes remained lost in another place and I wondered why.
Another H and S sign limped past. “Do not open beer bottles with your teeth when you are drunk. You will only realize this is a bad idea the next morning.” Who were they kidding?
I recognized the building near it. It was by the Business Center for Not Answering Questions. I remembered how, at one time, it had been a popular institution, giving high-profile talks on the importance of not answering too many questions in business because it had been proven to cut into profits. It was rumored that if anyone ever tried to clarify anything they said, they simply ignored them.
Or sometimes they all put on hats and pretended to be French.
More buildings passed by, but the new architecture just looked like secondhand ideas served up cold, seeping disdain into the city. I didn’t like it.
Finally we thumped through a gate and into a massive lot heaving with police drongles—some empty, and others disgorging people into the night.
The cop chewing gum opened the hood with a grunt, shoved my bag into my cuffed hands, and nodded. It was pouring rain as we climbed out and wove our way through the puddles and across the drenched lot that sparkled with reflected lights.
Head Hack Central was lit up with glowing red columns of light. The building was meant to look like it came from classical Greece, but the facade was more like a cross between a wedding cake and a nativity display.
I had been here as a cop.
As we walked through the massive worn doors and into a lobby, memories came at me, one after the other, like stones dropped in a still pool. But I ignored them all. There would be plenty of time to trawl the memories of this place and I wasn’t interested in doing that yet. I had been traveling for what seemed like a decade, and right now I just needed to get out of here and find a bed.
We were led down a corridor lined with offices. The woman was taking it all in. It occurred to me she was looking for a way out, and I suddenly felt a frisson of pity for her. Now I understood why she had been caught up in her thoughts in the drongle.
She had something to hide.
chapter
THREE
The use of the color red was restricted in New Seattle, because the cops held the franchise. That’s why they carried small red truncheons and guns, because it was a marketing thing. I learned all this from a chubby cop who chattered good-naturedly as he left the two of us in a small temporary holding area, composed of a dozen seats enclosed by a small cage. He kept my bag, saying I could pick it up on the way out.
A few other people were already waiting under the glare of a harsh fluorescent light that doused the area with a particularly soulless sense of inhumanity. Across from me was a gaunt man, staring off at things only he could see. His limp-waisted appearance made it appear as though his body had been blown up without quite enough air, and his thin lips didn’t seem as if they would have any words behind them. He saw me and smiled, and it creased up more of his face than expected. The girl paced slowly around, still taking in the layout, and I wondered if she would make a bolt for it when they took off our cuffs.
Then someone else was brought in, remonstrating fiercely with a cop. “But I have a license to drop melons,” he was saying. His voice was thick with phlegm, and he dripped water from a blotchy raincoat.
“Sure you do,” said the cop, shoving him through the gate and leaning his bulging shopping bag up against the desk.
“I do. I have it here. You want to see it?”
“There’s no such thing as a license to drop ripe melons from the roofs of very high buildings,” said the cop. “Make yourself comfortable. We’ll call you.”
“But I have license. Where’s the thing?” He began to thumb through his raincoat pockets, pulling out a variety of dirty objects. “I got it from the State Department. It cost me fifty dollars. Hey—you see? Here!” He flourished a piece of paper and shoved it through the bars.
“You write this yourself?” said the cop, handing it back.
“No! It’s a genuine license to drop ripe melons from the roof of tall buildings. Genuine! You haven’t read it, have you? An official melon license. Ah, goddamn it. Cops!” He took the thing back, rammed it into his pocket, and sat down grouchily across from us. I could see a melon protruding from the top of his shopping bag by the main desk.
I sat back and closed my eyes, and realized the smell of disinfectant in this place hadn’t changed at all. Another cascade of memories came at me, bright and clear.
Then a tiny voice filled me with a shiver, and it took me a moment to realize that it was someone whispering in my ear.
“They say there’s another city like this one, but it is empty,” it said, and I opened my eyes and turned.
It was an old man.
“What?” His deep blue eyes sparkled and then he leaned close to my ear again and whispered, “A place where there are no people. And you walk through and there’s not a sound. Just the empty buildings. I’ve dreamed of it.”
His delicate words slid through me and I felt them resonate.
“About an empty city?”
“Shh! Not so loud. Shh!” He pulled a wilted smile so fragile it was touching. “Secret,” he said gently, drawing away from me and making a wide welcoming gesture with his hands.
Then a cop grabbed him by the arm and hauled him through the gate and off down the corridor like he was a small child. “Mr. Zargowski, they’re all waiting for you.” The man held my gaze as he stumbled backward until the reality of his situation broke over him and he collapsed in a tantrum.
“Don’t do this to me!” he cried. “Please. Don’t do this. For the love of God!” Another cop went over to help the first as he began to kick and scream, lying like a child on the floor.
“I don’t want to live a waking death!”
“This is a routine head hack. You’ll be fine, like everyone else. I promise you, you won’t feel anything. I promise.”
And they dragged him away. As his shouts receded I thought, but that’s what the guy is scared of, that he won’t feel anything. That he’ll come out from that room numb and senseless to whoever the hell he was when he went in. The girl was still pacing and I closed my eyes.
“This is a genuine melon-dropping license, isn’t it?” said the man, nudging me back to the present again. He thrust the crumpled sheet toward me.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“You see?” he said walking back to the bars. “You see? This guy knows!”
But the cop behind the desk ignored him. And then another came and led away the limp-waisted man opposite, and I saw his eyes were sunken dark things, as though the pools that had once been there had been drained.
He had the kind of history you don’t sit down next to in a bar, and yet I had deliberately sat down to talk to too many people like him over the past eight years.
They had been a distraction. A way of filling time without being left to the mercy of my memories. So those last years had become a vast wasteland in my life, and I did not want to acknowledge they had taken place. For most of them I had worked in a Memory Print store in a mall in Saratoga Springs. I’d printed out people’s memories. Twenty-four pictures from the last twenty-four hours for ten dollars, glossy or matte. I hadn’t been there because I got some job satisfaction printing out pictures for people so they could go away happy, or because I had enjoyed operating the cumbersome, ammonia-reeking machines. I worked there to pilfer other pasts, immersing myself in other people’s lives so I could avoid my own. At Memory Print, there was always a fresh supply of someone else’s life to live inside for a while.
&
nbsp; But I had never had my memories printed out, even though the company allowed employees free access. They would have been proof that all I experienced from day to day was my life, and if it was on paper it would be harder to disown.
Another cop headed over, his huge feet landing on the floor in untidy steps. He beckoned to the girl and me. “You two. This way.”
The girl stared at me, and I saw her brown eyes burn with adrenaline.
But there was no way out for her.
chapter
FOUR
A grimy corridor.
The cop tapped a framed certificate. It said: “New Seattle Police are congratulated on being second in the interstate police awards for the most doughnuts eaten on a stakeout.” He’d done a stint for a couple of hours as part of the team, he said, and didn’t eat another thing for the next twenty-four hours. Then he got to talking about how the red smoke they used when they went in had stained his hair. We passed offices with the doors ajar, stacked with files and people lazing behind desks letting the time wander past until their shift was done. And ultimately, I guess, until their life was done, too.
“You’re in here, lady,” said the cop, opening a door marked: Head Hack 4. “And you’re next door, in five.” He nodded to me. His eyebrows had been stained a faint shade of red, too. He undid the cuffs. “We remove the red-tag collars when you’re done.”
I wondered if the girl would try and run, but she turned and was gone.
A nurse appeared through the door to Head Hack 4. She had a smile that was so full of lipstick and insincerity that it made unusual demands on her face.
“I’m Francine, your nurse today. This way.” Her heels fiercely clipped on the linoleum. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” she said over her shoulder as she led me through a small white room that was surprisingly ordered and clean—totally at odds with the paper-filled chaos of the offices we had passed.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Or a glass of wonker?” She turned and smiled again but the expression never reached her eyes.
“Wonker? What is that?”
“It’s like water, but not as good.”
“Okay. No thanks, then,” I repeated. She opened the door. It was a small operating room, and I was hit with the rich smell of ammonia—the same smell that had infected the Memory Print store in Saratoga. It caught at the back of the throat and drove my mind to reach back and touch the raw ends of my past.
“So you said no to the wonker?” asked the woman.
“That’s it.”
“Then please take a seat in the chair and we’ll see if we can find anything useful.”
“A lot of pictures of the small bar I was in last night outside of Portland, is my guess, or maybe the diner where I ate chop suey that contained more MSG than actual food,” I said as I sat down. The room had no windows, but one of the walls was glazed and looked into a viewing booth.
“Yes, I’m sure. But it’s amazing what people store away, isn’t it? Sometimes without knowing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s amazing what you can store away.”
“Everyone has a past,” she said. “I’ll get you your wonker.”
“Everyone has a past,” I repeated.
And that’s the problem isn’t it? I thought. It would be easier if we just didn’t. Or if we could erase the bits we didn’t like, or could just choose someone else’s.
That’s all I had been trying to do in Memory Print. Thumbing through everyone else’s past so I didn’t have to recall my own. The past was not my friend, and I’d tried to avoid it. I’d pushed it away. But the more I’d pushed it away, the more it came at me, like a rabid dog straining and straining on a chain, getting closer to the moment when it could bite.
chapter
FIVE
Mendes had been sent from Washington to oversee Porlock, Inc. It was a new department whose function was to stop people from doing stupid things.
The government was unleashing massive state funding into the area, after research at MIT reported that people doing stupid things was costing the country billions every year.
DST, as they called it, was one of the biggest waste areas of the country’s entire economy. The president himself had said in a confidential memo that this was the new frontier; the war on people doing stupid things could affect the position of the U.S. as a world leader.
Even just that morning at Porlock, an agent had interrupted a man intent on driving a golf cart as fast as possible into a swimming pool, and another had rescued a gamekeeper who had just been zipped up in a giant pheasant costume and set loose during a shoot by some animal activists to see how he liked it. They had also interrupted a man who had taken the cover off the main computer at air traffic control and was about to try and fix it with a spoon.
But in his heart Mendes didn’t like overprotecting people like this.
He stared down at the city lights sprawled out below, and saw the glow of the brightly colored musical fingerprint and head hack booths. As he followed the streets, they wandered their way up the coast and crawled into the shadowy, undulating hills that once the coyotes had called their own.
Hadn’t he been a Harvard high flyer? Hadn’t he gone to work in Washington with high ideals of making the world a better place? And now, here he was in charge of some satellite project that seemed sordid and sad.
But if he made a good job of this, then he’d be promoted when he got back to Washington. He just had to make sure it all ran smoothly. But babysitting the operation didn’t inspire him, however cutting edge the technology.
He tried to pick out the lights of the main gate of the new city wall, tracing the roads that were flecked with orange lights. And that’s when it struck him that the maple and myrtle trees were nearly gone from this city, and the few that he could see looked bedraggled and sad. They were going through the motions of doing all that photosynthesis stuff everyone always gave them so much credit for, but their heart clearly wasn’t in it.
Nature hardly had a toehold here.
His office door burst open. It was Kahill.
“We’ve got a virus,” Kahill said. “The system is entirely infected. The mainframe is locked up.”
“Locked up? All of it?”
“Yeah. The sensors are jammed and the screens are down.”
“How could we have caught a virus? This is a closed system.”
“Yeah. That’s the mystery. I still think it’s probably just something random thought up by a kid in his bedroom.”
“A kid?”
“Yeah. There’s a message on all the screens that says: ‘Can someone please remind me how to do long division?’ But we’ll sort it. Don’t you worry, sir.”
Kahill fumbled with the door as he made his way out.
chapter
SIX
So, if you sit up for me and pop on the bib,” said the nurse, bringing out her dead smile again, “and also pop on the safety goggles for me as well?”
I hadn’t been patronized this much since I was five.
“And I’ve put your wonker there,” she said, indicating a glass.
She fixed up the bib and plugged a lead into my feed as a balding man with a ring of neatly trimmed hair at the level of his ears hit the room rapidly, carrying a file.
“So, I’m Dr. Johansson, and this will only take a few seconds. We’re going to get a few images from your head.” He looked through some notes. “This is a routine, twenty-four hour memory hack.”
He tactfully didn’t mention that long-term hacks, which were classed as anything beyond twenty-four hours, still had a better-than-even chance of leaving the patient a vegetable.
“So, okay. Good, that all looks good. Have you been hacked in the last two weeks?” He perched on the desk, staring at me. He was wearing a white coat. I sensed his mind was partially burned away by the stress of his responsibility, but that had given him even more leeway to be smug. It was as though he felt that his job gave him a reason to feel he had a vali
d role on the earth, and nobody else’s did.
“No,” I said.
“Owkaaaay. Are you on any medication?”
“No.”
“Any problems with headaches?”
“No.”
“Any allergic reactions to alfalfa?”
“No.”
“You’re certain about that? No swelling? What about sneezing? Anything like that?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t make you feel hunched? So you walk like this?” He lifted his shoulders into his neck, bent forward, and walked a couple of steps.
“No. Definitely doesn’t do that. It gets stuck between my teeth, but that’s about it.”
“Good, okay. That makes things simpler. Shall I check the box for adverts? We insert them perfectly painlessly and they’ll play across your memory randomly once a day, maybe twice, for about a month, and then fade away. You’ll get paid a small sum. It’s easy money.”
“No adverts, thanks.”
“You’re certain? We have one about cookies at the moment. It’s very unobtrusive. It lasts only about fifteen seconds, and is quite funny.”
“No way,” I said. “I do not want adverts.”
“As you wish. So, sign here and here. And fingerprint there. And kiss the paper there.”
He shoved a pen in my hand and held the form for me.
“And kiss there, please,” he said, pushing it to my face. “Kiss. Harder—and again. Right. This is your copy and your spare, which you send to the ombudsman. Though the last ombudsman was sacked for not knowing what the word ombudsman actually meant. He thought it was to do with gardening. Can you believe that?”
His words rattled out quickly, as though by cutting out the pauses from his life, he thought he might gain an extra ten minutes in the day.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, so…Look directly forward and hold your head nice and still for me. That’s it. Fire the Head Torsion, please, Francine.”
Two flat boards on the end of some kind of hydraulic arms squeezed onto my cheeks, clamping my head into a vice and forcing my mouth open until I was doing a bad impression of a fish.