iRemember E-Book

S.V. Bekvalac

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 449

Beschreibung

'Bekvalac bursts onto the scene with a deftly-written SF noir tale of memory, identity and self-awareness' – AJ DeaneThe city of iRemember shimmers in the desert haze, watched over by the Bureau, a government agency that maintains control through memory surveillance and little pink pills made from the narcotic plant Tranquelle.It looks like an oasis under its geodesic dome, but the city is under siege. 'Off-Gridder' insurgents are fighting to be forgotten.Bureau Inspector Icara Swansong is on a mission to neutralise the threat. Her investigation leads her into iRemember's secret underbelly, where she finds herself a fugitive from the very system she had vowed to protect. She has to learn new rules: trust no one. Behind every purple Tranquelle stalk lurk double-agents.A sci-fi noir with a psychedelic twist, iRemember explores the power the past holds over us and the fragility of everything: what is, what once was, and what will be.

Leseprobe

Published in 2020

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

Copyright © SV Bekvalac 2020

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 9781785632051

Contents

The Beginning: Lucian Ffogg

The first beginning

The second beginning

The third beginning

The Rest: Other People

The Ending: Desert

The first ending

The second ending

The last ending

Acknowledgements

The Beginning: Lucian Ffogg

The first beginning

Other people’s memories were once an undiscovered country, as strange as the surface of some gaseous planet. And the Government facility in which they are now kept is no less alien: a monstrosity like a nuclear farmstead in a desert valley.

The desert here is all rock, sand, yucca plants, and heat. Impossible, rock-cracking, geo-physical heat. Mustard-coloured sunsets. Nights as dark and empty as the sea at its deepest point – somewhere near the Rift Valley. Only much, much drier.

Ridges of rock unfurl like grey matter. Pebbles and scattered scree are desert amygdalae and hippocampi. This desert is a sun-baked brain with mountain ranges to the north, south, east and west. A rain shadow. A dry, unearthly kind of place.

The compound quivers – a central control tower and its outhouses; a dream under the guillotine of the sun. Seen from a Government plane cruising above them at 25,000 feet, these buildings resemble a rusting sword and several dead armadillos on chapped earth.

You don’t know these leviathan hangars exist. But they do. There are hundreds of them dotted around, in out-of-the-way places only birds with incredibly large wingspans ever bother to visit. Some of them in the Deserts; some near the Tranquelle Belt; others far from it.

And this particular Memory Processing Plant is watched over by one solitary Government employee – a certain Lucian Ffogg.

Who is Lucian Ffogg?

How is Lucian Ffogg?

It’s classified. He’s not at liberty to say.

But he will soon have to. You can’t keep secrets from Government Inspectors.

The second beginning

The City in its geodesic dome is surrounded by a wide, circular expanse of desert. Then comes the Tranquelle Belt – a bright purple Eden. And then desert again. Oblivion orbiting.

In the centre of the City is the Temple. A monument to truth.

Inside the Temple are the Brethren, who have built an empire of paper. And no sense of irony.

On one of the papers, framed in the entrance hall, are the Tenets.

It is on this strong foundation that the City is built.

It is written:

Tenet 1. That paper and the ink upon it are sacred.

Tenet 2. That the digital is opium. We renounce digital memory. We rely only on paper records.

Tenet 3. No Tranquelle shall pass a Brother’s lips. We are sober.

Tenet 4. We shall not engage in illegal activities of any kind.

Tenet 5. No killing. Only Forgetting.

Tenet 6. Long Live Frome. We promise to water the fragile flower of the relationship between the Temple and the Bureau.

Tenet 7. Remember. No Tranquelle.

Tenet 8. Forgive, for we cannot forget.

Tenet 9. We will go out into the world and find other Brothers to join us.

Tenet 10. There must be ten tenets.

These are the Tenets of the Brethren.

The third beginning

The City gate stands tall and glistening. A portal into the homeostasis of the dome world. Border control guards cluster around the opening. They guard the City jealously. Like treasure. Like the last of the water in a drying world. In their regulation Government suits – hydrophobic, crime-phobic. Only mildly xenophobic. The sick-sticks they use to stun any would-be gatecrashers to the City party hang at their waists. Green candy canes, but with a less than veiled threat of violence. This border checkpoint is the customs gate through which all goods squeezed from the Tranquelle Belt pass, by means of a kind of vehicular peristalsis, feeding the urban mass behind the gate.

The City. The State. iRemember.

If it looks familiar, that’s because we’ve been here before. It is said that this is humanity’s fifth ride on the rollercoaster of time. Deep in the library of the Temple there’s an ancient, obscure book written by a Brother Derek who posits that the universe plays and replays itself. Or that, as he puts it: ‘…humanity is a fish caught in the endlessly loosening and tightening net of Father Time. Over the centuries he fishes. Yet the fish he catches is always the same.’

Let’s suppose Brother Derek is right. That there used to be other timelines, other futures, not unlike this one. Those futures are in the past now. But they were the present once. When the climate was rapidly changing, and technology was rapidly evolving. The people living then must have had similarly large brains and an ability to manipulate surveillance tools. They too must have searched for the meaning in life. Witnessed the daily fight of good against bad. The fight of the weak against the strong. There was a lot of fighting, and the battles were the kind where everyone lost.

Most Citizens of iRemember haven’t heard of Brother Derek. The Citizens know, or think they know, that time runs in a line, and not in a circle. It’s called a timeline, after all, isn’t it?

Their City is permanent and beautiful.

And if there are other futures, they are living in the brightest of the lot.

‘Our learned philosophers have speculated that the universe makes and unmakes itself and that there were five futures before this one. Imagine that! Five timelines, whose leaders led their people into the abyss. Thank your lucky stars you’re in this one. A bright future. With a leader who cares. And as much Tranquelle as you can eat. The best of all possible futures.’

Helena Frome, Book of Speeches, Early Years

A small Government plane, bearing the unmistakeable orange and gold state logo, an hourglass not unlike an angular infinity sign, nested inside three concentric circles, descended several thousand feet. It did not plummet exactly, but it wafted in a zigzag fashion, like an aeroplane made of paper, at the mercy of the jumble of air-currents above the desert valley.

The plane held, gingerly between paper-thin wings, the fragile body of Inspector Icara Swansong, Mnemonic Bureau Rank 4. And the frightened body of an inexperienced pilot on his maiden flight.

‘Engine failure. Engine. Failure,’ whispered Lucian. To no effect. The plane continued to waft towards the runway like an autumn leaf, casting a shadow as it fell.

He squinted up at the aluminium shade, a nebulous aerospace shark, looming. It filled the valley. It filled Lucian with a dark, foreboding dread. Today he would be weighed and measured according to Government guidelines. He had managed to avoid one of these inspections for four years. He had submitted satisfactory self-evaluation reports. But something had come up. Scientifically Proven God damn it! He still wasn’t sure how. He had been so careful. A query around his last psych-evaluation.

He waved up at the plane, all the while imagining that he was holding an anti-aircraft gun over his shoulder. There was nothing wrong with his psyche. There had been a time when he hated the City. Now he just wanted it to remain where it was. Far away. And leave him in peace. Besides, who came up with the tests? Who decided what was normal? Pick a colour: grey. Normal. Pick a feeling: misery. Normal. Pick a Tranquelle supplement: No thank you. These were all perfectly normal reactions. Like any normal person, he simply wanted to be left alone. They had this stuff on file. They knew him better than he knew himself.

He thought he’d rigged those psych-evaluation things to always come out clean as a whistle.

He was getting old. And sloppy.

He imagined the plane crashing into one of the surrounding crags. Falling. Bouncing from rock to rock, like a climber from a height. For a while it looked like his wish might come true. But then it didn’t. Instead, the plane landed unharmed and taxied down the runway. It came to a complete and definitive stop not far from the compound’s main entrance.

The post of Government Inspector was usually reserved for those who had put in the time. And looked it. Seeing the flush of youth behind the bi-plane glass, Lucian’s dread turned into bitter distrust. Swansong was, he guessed, in her early thirties.

Icara stretched out of the aircraft, like a horrible letter unfolding from a horrible envelope.

How much Tranquelle did they make you swallow?

It made his back teeth hurt just thinking about it. He shuddered. He hadn’t touched the stuff for years. And his career showed it.

The Inspector was, nevertheless, an impressive sight. And she stood out in the surrounding nothing like a piece of urban shrapnel. Her hair was pristine. A tight, dark chignon. Long, athletic legs covered in a thin gauze of seamed stocking. The rest of the Government Inspector: manicured perfection under crisp tailoring, in regulation emerald green. The contours of her face were well-drawn but severe. Lucian could tell, immediately, that she was a dangerous viper, despite the touch of red lipstick. Blood red. Where she’d eaten the last CMO who failed a psych-evaluation. Or a red flower to disguise her viper fangs.

The viper dusted herself and her green luggage down and looked around, taking in the surroundings. A landscape the colour of a coffee stain. Even the landing strip. A smoker’s tongue of tarmac led up to the complex of buildings that appeared to have congregated by accident.

The young pilot saluted Lucian from the cockpit. The salute was brief and perfunctory. Before Lucian was able to salute right back, or beg the pilot to stay and keep him company so that they might brave the tsunami of Government inspection together, like soldiers in a jungle in the bad old days, the little white plane flew off, and disappeared behind a wisp of nimbus. Nothing more could be done about it. Lucian’s stomach plunged into his shoes. The Government Inspector had definitively and completely arrived. And he had been abandoned. He stood and waited for his fate. Which was walking towards him down the landing strip, in a Tranquelle-scented halo of Government resolve. And, if the past was anything to go by, this fate would be just like all the others: nasty, humiliating, unavoidable, and unfair.

Lucian was also, technically speaking, a Government employee. However, only technically. The Government ladder had come for him only after the rest of his career had plunged into a cloacal abyss. His rise from an early career suicide had been ponderous and slow, a scramble. If the hierarchy were architecture, he would have reached the skirting board in the basement. When he really thought about it, he still couldn’t believe it had happened. His stellar fall from grace after a stellar start as a graduate student made him a pariah in the City. Worse than a non-entity in the eyes of Frome’s Bureaucrats. Everyone knew that failure was contagious. Lucian was positively leprous with lack of success. And was treated as such.

Which was fine by him. He hadn’t really been to the City for decades. He had found the desert suited him.

As might be expected of a man who works completely alone, 365 days a year, in a desert deserted to metaphorical proportions, Lucian had long ago abandoned traditional notions of hygiene and kemptness. Grey hair cascaded around gaunt features like wiry undergrowth. Despite obvious malnutrition, old age had played a cruel trick on Lucian. It had given him a potbelly. The regulation blue overalls that engulfed his upper body and spindly legs were taut around his middle. This distorted the Government logo stamped on the front and caused the orange and gold transfer to split and peel. Just as well. He could live without Helena Frome’s stamp of approval.

Now, all alone under the spotlight of Icara Swansong’s all-seeing eyes, Lucian shifted like a cockroach. He was blinded by a glare that came from her green-tinted glasses.

‘Good afternoon Mr Fog. Inspector Swansong. Rank 4. How do you do?’ she held out a manicured hand.

Bureau royalty, thought Lucian. The day was getting worse and worse.

Next to her green skirt suit, which flashed like an ambulance light in the desert, Lucian felt like a bag of dirty clothes. Scruffy in the midday sun. Perhaps even giving off a sort of fusty smell. To his horror, he found he was afraid of this woman. He felt further afraid that she might notice his fear. And all of this made him angry. Which made his throat feel like a disused water pipe.

‘It’s F-fog-g,’ he managed. ‘Two Fs and two Gs. Ffogg.’

‘My apologies. Well, Mr Ffogg, don’t mind me. Just go about your daily business. Pretend I’m not here.’

At these words his whole body tensed. He might as well try to pretend that he was Helena Frome. Or that Frome and her Government no longer existed.

Since his last attempt at speech had gone so badly, he decided he wouldn’t be speaking to the Government Issue viper again if he could help it.

Life had never been kind to Lucian. And even now it wouldn’t allow him the dignity of his silence.

There was a sound of crockery breaking. In his moment of apprehension he had crushed a mug he had been holding between his fingers. The dry earth gulped at what looked like brown mercury, beading. It was gone before it had spilled. Except for the spreading stain on Icara’s left shoe. That’s when he remembered he had been holding a cup of coffee. What the hell, it was cold anyway.

‘Not to worry. That’ll come right out in a second. Built-in chromatic memory. Actually, before we begin, I would love a cup myself.’

Even though the atoms of her green Squid-Skin™ shoes had already begun to rearrange themselves, Lucian could tell that Icara was irate. Her tone was frosty. He could feel her making a note in her mental Government ledger. Strike one. Good. She wanted a coffee, did she? Maybe he could poison it for her.

She was crashing into the sanctuary he and Gurk had worked so hard to build together. Tearing the roof off their dolls’ house, with her surveillance gear and Tranquelle. He remembered that Gurk didn’t want to be remembered. So he quickly dropped the thought.

He made a vague motion for the Inspector to follow him to the control tower.

As he turned away from the vision in green, he half-hoped he had imagined the whole thing. He hoped that when he reached the entrance to his solitary haven, Icara would be gone – a mirage, a heat-haze in the sand. But as he left her on the warehouse floor and climbed the stairs to the kitchenette on the makeshift mezzanine, where he made coffee every morning, the click-clack of her stilettos on the linoleum and the smell of a Tranquelle vape told him she was still there. As he fumbled for the light switch in the dingy hole that smelled of grime and tinned soup, she stood below, waiting for him. When the light filled the room and scattered the roaches like a tiny nuclear blast, she was still there. Her jaws open. For coffee. And even though she was down on the warehouse floor, like a nasty version of Jonah in the belly of a whale, he felt the rusty corkscrew of the Government gaze boring into his neck.

He rummaged for the instant coffee under the sink. It had been so long since he had had a visitor of any kind that the coarse powder had clumped together, as if the grains were huddling for warmth. Safety in numbers, boys, that’s right – thought Lucian. He wished himself swallowed up in their centre. Cocooned by a protective wall of coffee and mould.

He felt a shiver go through him at the thought of the Government Inspector’s crocodilian eyes. Unblinking behind regulation frames. The tint had fallen away once they had stepped into artificial light. He could see her grey irises. These Inspectors were nothing but eyes. Always looking...and observing...spying and seeing...noticing...watching. Other synonyms for the hateful act of surveillance eluded him. Snakes in the grass. It reminded him of the reptile nest he would have to clear from the generator block. Nothing but snakes all morning.

The kettle boiled. While it half-whistled for fifteen minutes, Lucian stared at things. It was as if he was seeing himself and Lot 458 for the first time. He had never paid so much attention to the brown stain under the fire extinguisher. He had never noticed the islands of dirt and hair that peopled the space between the flooring and the skirting board, veritable miniature jungles of organic matter. He had paid no attention to the mould and fungi that had made a home around the light fitting. Now he stared at them until they disappeared and their after-image hovered before his eyes. To be dissolved by steam as it poured from the kettle.

***

Icara was armed with a mug of bad coffee and a touch-screen clip-pad. There was no putting it off any longer. The moment of torment was at hand. He would have to go about his business, with her there. For Scientifically Proven God knew how long. He felt stage fright. A faint ache in the pit of his stomach. He still hadn’t said anything. How long was she going to stay here? Where would she sleep?

And as if she had heard his silent questions, Icara pursed her glossy lips and blew words and Tranquelle like smoke rings. The words hung in the air. There was no un-hearing them. The words, like their mistress, were there to stay.

‘I hope to be here for one week. That should give me everything I need. I do hope this doesn’t inconvenience you too much. There will be an opportunity to provide feedback. The Bureau thanks you in advance for your cooperation and patience. And I am grateful too, as per article 4.0 of the Government Hospitality Code.’

Article 4.0! A whole week. How was it to be borne?! Lucian felt rising hostility. Was there, he wondered, a Government code for how he felt right now?

The last time there had been other people in the compound was lost in the mists of the past. Stored only on long-retired iRemember profiles. In the 40s, when the Bureau was still under Malcolm Drawbridge, the Government had automated memory-processing work and dismissed the 300 or so operatives they had originally employed to run the compound. They had replaced them with a battalion of hard drives, servers, cables, micro – and nanochips. They had employed a Chief Mnemonic Officer (Bureau Rank 1). CMO for short. The official title and fancy badge belied the simple truth: CMOs were really little more than security guards. Lucian had been assistant to the previous CMO. Gurk Caplan. Scientifically Proven God damn it. Why couldn’t he stop remembering Gurk?

The last time a Government Inspector had been along to Lucian’s little bit of desert, they had recommended he hire an assistant. So there had been a deputy. For two months. In the end, everyone had to admit, Government Inspector included, that that had been a mistake. The assistant had been gone for years. Lucian was allowed to operate as a lone wolf. Wolves do not fare well in deserts alone.

And now here she was. Icara Swansong. A snake. Breathing his precious air. Walking or slithering across his territory. And generally making herself at home in his kingdom...or hermitage...or hell hole. Whatever you wanted to call it, but damn it, it was his and his alone. Spoiling his solitude with her artificially inseminated positive outlook.

If he didn’t need a job and a place to live, and if he wasn’t intent on punishing himself in a self-flagellatory manner for past mistakes and lost chances, he would tell the pill-popping Frome clone where to shove it. As the converse was the case, silence would have to be a proxy for resistance.

‘I should tell you, before we begin, that I will be recording everything. With an ISpI-Pro 5200. For the purposes of the investigation,’ smiled Icara, through a vanilla haze.

He knew there would be surveillance. No amount of Lethene lining could stop a camera.

‘A camera. Hidden in the lenses of my glasses. As you can imagine, I don’t believe in hidden cameras. I find them unsavoury and unethical. No matter what the recommended code of practice recommends. I find it much better to let people know when they’re being observed. It’s more...humane. And by sharing secrets we build trust.’

A Bureaucrat, talking about trust! That was rich!

‘Don’t worry, Mr Ffogg. This needn’t be an ordeal. I can assure you I don’t bite. In fact, I’m sure we’re going to become firm friends.’

The ‘nice-guy’ inspectors were the worst kind.

They were not going to be firm friends. Not if Lucian had anything to say about the matter. He would find a way to sabotage her and her entire Government mission, or his name wasn’t Fog. He meant Ffogg. Damn the meddling woman, she had made him forget his own name!

***

Lucian was fighting a losing battle. There was something about Icara Swansong. Was it by telepathy or insinuation? She got you to do the things she wanted done.

Instead of pushing her down the stairs and burying her under three feet of hot sand, which is what he should have done, Lucian found himself opening doors for her and pointing her politely to the control room. Before he could help it, he was familiarising her with the fire evacuation procedure. Something he himself wasn’t familiar with. Still, he told her to do what he would do in the event of a conflagration. Run. He even unearthed the plans of the building to find out where the second toilet was. He needn’t have bothered. Icara Swansong had come prepared for the desert. Her suit had been fitted with a fluid recycling unit. She would occasionally press a button under one of the lapels and that was that. Like a nightmare from a bad science fiction film.

Lucian realised by noon on that first day that there was no waking up from it. The nightmare was here to stay. For at least a week. Unless he could do something to get rid of her.

***

By 12:30 they had settled in the control room.

Icara had another Tranquelle vape sticking out of the corner of her mouth. The room smelled of sickly vanilla.

Tranquelle: Let the Lady be Calm an early advertising tagline for the pink stuff had run. Lucian remembered it from his childhood. On a great orange and brown billboard. A smiling starlet lounging under a palm tree with a tall drink in one hand, and a packet of Tranquelle in the other. Basking in the glow of the sun. In the days before they had had to put up a protective tarpaulin over their world. It came in three forms. The vaporiser; the powder – to mix into your tea; and the ever-popular little pink pill. Strong. Warm. Fluffy. Just how City people liked their oblivion. Now truckloads of the stuff were pumped into the City each day. The City was drowsy from it. It had seeped into the bedrock; it was part of the water supply. And Lucian hadn’t touched the stuff. Not since arriving in the desert. Not since Gurk had made him swear never to take it again.

Lucian felt a wave of nausea wash over him.

I may hate this Government more than anyone else in it, he thought, but at least my fake allegiance is real. And not enhanced by a vape stick. With all my anti-establishment feeling, I must be the only truly loyal employee Frome has.

Lucian sat in front of a panel bristling with buttons. There were sliders, switches, numbered buttons, and dials. A screen that beamed white light across the control room dwarfed him.

The desert arm of iRemember.

The console and its accoutrements were ageing. And Lucian and his predecessor had spilled many a meal over them. But this room remained, despite its best efforts to look shabby, an obvious nerve centre. The hub of the whole memory processing operation. The nerve centre of the Arc-Hives. The control room of Lot 458. It was where Lucian whiled and wiled away his days: downloading, rewriting, and making adjustments according to official mathematical guidelines. And so forth. Downloading thoughts onto memory sticks and putting the memory sticks into storage boxes. Sending regular Bad Memory updates to the Bureau, who passed them on to the Brethren. The process was painstaking. Or it would have been, if Lucian hadn’t been sabotaging it.

Now he played dumb. For Icara Swansong’s eyes only. The Government Inspector watched. Occasionally she would mumble something like ‘unsatisfactory’. Or ‘A very different approach in Lot 683.’ Or ‘The data is not yet robust...but there does appear to be a correlation.’ Lucian peeked over her shoulder at one moment, half expecting to see some gossip column or whatever True Crime series was trending these days. He recoiled at the sight of visualisation graphics. Pie charts of his mediocrity shimmered in 3-D. It was damn good cover. But he knew she wasn’t here to analyse the workings of the plant. She had been sent here to analyse him. As long as she didn’t find the Lethene, everything would be fine.

The fact that the City held him at its mercy once again, and that he cared, turned fear back into anger. A thick vein pulsed near a wrinkled temple, keeping time with the clicking of console dials.

How, thought Lucian, did we end up here?

It was quite simple really. One bad memory.

Followed by an interminable eternity of miserable memories. All of these belonged to him. And countless good memories. These usually belonged to other people. Years of mnemonic graphics, emails and calls from his Bureau superiors – which seemed to include anyone else at all.

One Bad Memory. Helena Frome was like a bridge in wartime. You could only cross her once.

There was something in the set of the Government Inspector’s shoulders that had made the bad memory zombie-shrug, shake the dirt of decades from its shoulders.

Emily. And the end of what might have been a brilliant career.

Lucian’s mother, whom he had buried along with the zombie memory, five years ago, never tired of telling him quite how brilliant the career would have been. According to Mrs Ffogg, her son would have shone with the brightness of a thousand suns, by Scientifically Proven God. In the end, even Mrs Ffogg had to admit – as she lay in a hospital bed in the City General, sucking up morphine like milkshake through a straw – that her son had been more of a red dwarf. Or a singularity. His career had collapsed in on itself. She comforted herself with the thought that he had shone too brightly.

He tried to shake off the past. Who was this green viper woman that she should be unearthing the long dead? He had stopped thinking about Emily. Now she only came to him in the small hours of the morning, or in the basement, where he had hidden the engrams even Gurk didn’t know about. These were heavy memories, which sat on his chest and restricted his breathing. They would make him get up with indigestion, and pace until sunrise when he could sleep again.

Data ran across the four-foot-tall curved screen. Codes upon codes, and preview images of memories. Thoughts crunched to pixels. Pixels crunched down further still, and streaming in a steady flow. Ants. A spider army of engrams. Lucian felt a faint pinching in the pit of his stomach. The spiders were crawling across the screen and across his vision. He closed his eyes, and shook his head a little. He hoped the Government Inspector had not noticed.

Icara wasn’t looking at the data either. She had a dreamy look in her eye. Maybe she was remembering something particularly lovely for the servers. Or maybe it was the Tranquelle.

Fizzing, lurching nausea. It wasn’t the codes. She was making him sick.

Sick or not, Lucian could have done this job in his sleep. It was basic stuff. The memories that filtered in to the plant were airborne, picked up by an enormous receiver on the roof of the control tower. The receivers were huge. They looked like gigantic, spinning hourglasses surrounded by three concentric rings. Each ring spinning in a different direction. The receivers were made of copper and special ingredient x. Scientists used to know what this ingredient was, but Helena Frome had the name of the chemical compound changed in all the State dictionaries to avoid international espionage. The land around the City was covered with the receivers. Hourglasses spinning gently in breezes. Going green in the poisonous air of the Tranquelle Belt. Lucian liked to think of them as symbols for the fact that the whole rotten empire’s time was up. The design hadn’t changed much since the early days.

Tranquelle came later. You could record the basic content of memories without it. These electrical impulses were already tech-available. That was the term used by the first iRemember coders. But the data would be missing key elements: sound and smell. As well as, for some reason, the flavour of apples. Which made up a surprising number of other flavours. iRemember, the code and the City State named in honour of it, was the Trojan Horse of human consciousness. The State had developed an enormous digital storage system overseen by thousands of memory processing plants. A state-wide computer system, maintained by Lucian Ffogg and others like him, all administered by the Bureau in the City. Once the electrical impulses had been sifted out mechanically by special ingredient x, they were turned into binary code by powerful processors, also containing special ingredient x. The code would crawl digitally into the mnemonic cell and arrest the nucleus, cutting out the mnemonic equivalent of DNA. The memory would be petrified, safe, and suitable for storage. The first and most important part of the process was performed automatically. iRemember’s software could disarm memories on its own. Memory data is volatile and emotive. It has a kind of pheromone code that tells you whether the memory is a firecracker or a damp squib. Some memories are more dangerous than others. Some are little more than tiny dots of matter floating in complete darkness. Others, like certain elements, are so reactive that they cannot remain in one permanent state. And cannot be stored with others. They are parasitic. They can grow, spreading and infecting neighbouring engrams.

The screen streamed numbers and dashes which concealed the daily exploits of Belters, Citizens, even pariahs like Lucian, and anyone else under Frome’s jurisdiction. The code flowed like digital rain, at break-neck speed. Lucian was the bucket. The Bureau didn’t care about every drop. What it cared about, and what the Brethren cared about, were so-called Bad Memories. As defined by Bureau Code, point 8.34.

‘A memory shall be deemed to be Bad if it records activity violating any of the Ten Tenets or Frome’s Civic Law Code.’

That was the gist of it anyway. Lucian was paraphrasing. He suspected Icara Swansong could have quoted it verbatim, and listed examples from the Civic Law Code.

CMOs were charged with observing the torrents and spotting Bad Memories at source. They would then be subject to further screenings by qualified members of the Brethren.

Lucian wasn’t really looking. Firstly, this was due to volume. It was like looking at the word spoon over and over again. Until it unspooled, and just became a kind of dilated vowel sound, a gaping nothing. Secondly, he didn’t need to look. He had written a code to disable iRemember’s emotion sensors. And another one to play the occasional Bad Memory and ping it across to Bureau HQ. Not too Bad. Not bad enough for the Brethren to do anything about it. If they looked, they would have found that the Bad Memories were the same few on a loop. Just so the Bureau wouldn’t suspect that Lucian wasn’t looking. Mathematically, the incidence of Bad Memories across a given population was relatively low. Something like one in 100,000. When he saw the wicked flash of red indicating a Bad Memory, Lucian would stop the process and forward the memory through to the Bureau.

Everything else he would simply store away. The walls of the room were lined with Government packages of memory sticks, tiny pointed snowglobes of Bioware. Lucian would receive a shipment of these at regular intervals. Like the Government Inspector, they came by plane, in plastic crates, emblazoned with the orange and gold logo. He had hoped, when he first saw the shadow of Icara Swansong’s flying machine against the sky, that she was nothing more than another consignment of memory sticks. She was not a memory stick. The memory sticks were phials of Bioware. They were tiny, the size of a thumb. They looked like black glass and could house billions of petabytes of engrams. The Government Inspector could, at best, house one petabyte, and most of this would be irretrievable, each engram deteriorating at every moment of recall. The human brain was useless as a memory bank. You might as well toss your cherished memories on a rubbish heap.

At the end of the workday, large refrigerated cases of Bioware sticks would be carted to the enormous organic servers. The Arc-Hives. These hangars had been erected in a circle around the central control tower and warehouse. Once the hangar doors closed on them the memories would rest. Encased in Bioware. Stable and dormant. Indefinitely. Memory storage was the State’s most cost-effective form of surveillance. It didn’t require setting up cameras and infrastructure all over the State. The gently spinning receivers with the hourglass centres were relatively cheap to produce. A single receiver could cover swathes of land and whole communities. The receivers themselves could last for at least a hundred years before they needed topping up with special ingredient x. Once stored, the records of daily life could be recalled perfectly, by anyone, at any time. Re-lived. Helena Frome’s bureaucracy never forgets. The Bureau would access its vast memory stores for purposes of crime prevention, state security, insurance, targeted advertising, education and healthcare. The Arc-Hives were a marvel and a monument. They were the City. And they guarded it and its Citizens against erasure and oblivion. Against the disintegrating environment, the dust, and Desert Rings 1 and 2. They were a welcome respite from the poison air in the Belt and angry unrest in the Sub-Urbs. The Citizens slept better at night knowing that their Government was looking after them with its vast network of powerful, unimaginably complex technology. iRemember. The City’s conscience.

But all of this was beyond Lucian’s remit. And none of it mattered one bit. Lucian was not interested in the memory of the State. He was interested in forgetting. Everything. He wanted the job for its mindlessness. A mnemonic flow so unfamiliar and strong that it could keep his own miserable past at bay, day after day. The presence of Icara Swansong was getting in the way of good, natural oblivion.

Look at her! The dilated pupils of permanent job satisfaction. When he first started work for Gurk, the Tranquelle dosage for Government workers had still been small. Now they had obviously increased it. Icara would leave every three minutes, then come back into the room reeking of vanilla-scented happiness. He was miserable. But at least his misery wasn’t Government Issue. Every memory stick consignment came with Tranquelle supplies for the CMO. Lucian had been disposing of the vape packets and prescriptions. There were more grains of unused Tranquelle in his desert lot than sand. He hadn’t taken a single pill since ’88. They said the cold turkey from Tranquelle killed you slowly. They hadn’t known this until it was too late, and half the Cabinet had started taking it in the name of improving iRemember. As if your reality were being sand-blasted away, atom by atom. Coming into sharp focus and then shattering. An agonising quasi-eternity of oblivion. It was just Lucian’s luck that Lethene was the antidote.

Icara came back from another vape break. She perched on a broken swivel chair with a stain on it. Lucian felt embarrassed and then angry that he felt embarrassed. How on earth did all these stains suddenly take over the place? It’s a conspiracy of filth.

Her large eyes wide open, lizard-like. Lucian hadn’t seen her blink once since she arrived. He wondered if blinking would impede the action of the SpI-Pro 52-something-or-other-whatever-she’d-called-it.

He went back to staring blankly at the screen, looking without seeing, until the surface became mottled and out of focus.

***

When she returned to the Control Room, Icara decided to hit Lucian Ffogg where it hurt. She demanded to see the compound’s accounts.

‘Well, Mr Ffogg, it’s time to see your financial records,’ she said.

The words made Lucian’s skin crawl.

Nevertheless, he made his way, with the Government Inspector behind him, along the mezzanine walkway. Looking down through the grille gave him vertigo. The Government Inspector’s stilettos made xylophone sounds on the mesh.

The compound’s financial records were, in a word, non-existent. The real records, that is. There were files full of numbers of course. Lucian submitted a bogus report of costings once every two years, churned out by the same code that played his stash of Bad Memories for him. He wasn’t stealing exactly. Or at least he hadn’t started the stealing and he wasn’t doing it to line his own pockets. But technically speaking he was breaking Tenet 4.

Gurk – who would just have to be remembered every once in a while, whether he liked it or not – had begun the process of tweaking the ledgers when Lucian joined him in ’88. The Bureau had bizarre and immovable financial rules and stipulations, set out in its Transaction Codex. The Codex had been written by some green-suited Bureaucrat who had never managed a Memory Processing Plant, or (and Lucian felt this one was more likely) who liked a really good joke at the expense of everyone who did. There were no funds for anything useful. Nothing for generator repair, good coffee or mild sabotage. Any funds that were not used at the end of a two-year fiscal cycle had to be returned, Frome dollar for Frome dollar. Frome cent for Frome cent. Back to Frome’s walnut-lined State Treasury. For reassignment.

When Lucian had arrived at Lot 458, Gurk couldn’t believe his luck. The Off-Gridder boy wonder! The inventor of Lethene. He had read about him in the news. Discredited by the Government, his research derided, stripped of his degrees, Lucian had fallen like a proverbial angel into Gurk’s proverbial lap. No such thing as Lethene, the headlines had said. Of course, if you need a headline to deny it, you know someone in a lab has probably made sure it exists. Lethene was real. And Gurk had a plan. With a little accounting magic, the Bureau would give back to Lucian what it had taken away. By the time Gurk retired, four years ago, the Bureau was paying for illegal Lethene manufacture across the State. Funding Off-Gridder activity, without knowing. Helena Frome was paying for the gradual eradication of her own empire. It was very gradual. Now, with the Government Inspector here, it would have to come to a complete halt.

Lucian missed Gurk. One of the disadvantages of opting out of iRemember, where most normal people did the vast majority of their socialising, was that all the good memories of his erstwhile boss and only real friend were unregistered, not recorded, and would therefore eventually evaporate into the desert air, along with Lucian’s memories of fiddling the accounts. Lucian was comforted by the fact that Gurk, Scientifically Proven God rest his Scientifically Proven Soul, had dodged a bullet called Icara Swansong. He’d left his old buddy Lucian to take the hit.

He could hear Icara tutting, as she looked around, making notes, taking incriminating photographs with her nasty green lenses. He was in no doubt that his hangar and outbuildings broke every possible Government code. If he wasn’t panicking about the secret Tranquelle farm, he would have enjoyed the fact that his modus operandi was an irritation to a suited Bureaucrat from the ivory tower.

They reached a dented door. Finance Office. A thin tongue of paint peeled from the door frame. It was jeering at Icara. At Helena Frome, whose gold-plated face was emblazoned on Icara’s lapels. One ageing sun on either side of the Inspector’s chest.

The Finance Office had never really been an office; more of a broom-cupboard. Nevertheless, it had housed the finance department of the old compound, before Gurk, even before the Great Streamlining 40s, when all the workers had been streamlined into nonexistence. It had at one time housed Government employees Victor Melville and Arnold Alan – in their brown suits – as well as their secretary Lorna, three clacking typewriters, eight filing cabinets, and ugly orange and brown wallpaper. In more enlightened times the typewriters had given way to computer screens and biscuit-crumb-filled keyboards and Lorna had taken over from Victor Melville as Manager of Financial Operations. Now, in the times of Lucian Ffogg, the room was full of forgotten hardware. Obsolete accounting machines. Possibly also a skeleton wearing a ‘Lorna’ nametag could be found, if one bothered to go through the piles with a large shovel or a metal detector.

All in all, the past would be ashamed of what had become of the future.

It would have taken the Inspector the best part of the week to find out how to access files through the obsolete formats and equipment that littered the finance office. Most of the hardware in the carpeted room belonged under glass, in the City’s Accounting Museum. Where it would not be troubled by visitors, let alone Inspectors. The screens were decrepit. Yellowing. Icara doubted whether most of the tech detritus would even turn on. Lucian knew from experience that most of it wouldn’t.

‘I can give you a summary of income and expenditure if you like?’ Words that would normally have carried weighty dread were spoken with glee.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Icara. ‘I can just append your biannual submissions to my final report.’

Lucian had never heard such sweetness.

‘Shall we move on?’ Icara swept the room with her ISpI-Pro 5200, before closing the door behind her.

***

As the embarrassing process of inspection continued, Lucian found himself growing less and less fond of Icara Swansong.

Quite apart from the prying, and the possibility of being locked up in a cell at the Temple for sabotage, Lucian didn’t like that the opinion of this Government missionary seemed to matter to him. It was the way she looked at him after she had found a new failing. He found himself caring, before he had had the opportunity to reflect on how he felt about it. She wasn’t just diligent. She was mean. She took pleasure in uncovering bigger and better examples of his mediocrity.

How could he explain to this ecstatic arm of Frome’s Bureaucracy – whose outlook was as rosy as a packet of the pink stuff – that it would probably happen to her too? One day, she would look down at her Government Issue touch-screen pad and all the neatly typed report files inside it, and think to herself, ‘what does any of it matter?’ How could he ever explain to this woman what disappointment feels like? How could she possibly understand who she was really working for? She wouldn’t believe him if he told her. How could he explain to this bright-eyed harpy what it feels like to have your most banal, depressing dream of reality confirmed to yourself each morning? She couldn’t possibly understand what it would feel like to have your entire bright future reduced to dust in a matter of seconds by Helena Frome. To have your research torn up and tossed into the incinerator. To be denied a future because you looked too hard under the hood and found something no one wanted you to find. To hate Frome’s Bureau, and yet to want to belong to it? These were very complicated emotions. Lucian suspected that Inspector Swansong, underneath her green suit, was immune to complicated emotion. Like everyone else with a vape in their mouth. Sucking on the warm, happy milk of Helena Frome’s urban dream. Complicated emotions were the reason Lucian wanted oblivion, more than anything else.

He would like nothing better than to die in the desert. Alone and undisturbed. The City had already won. It was becoming hard to recruit Off-Gridders. The latest generation of Citizens didn’t seem to want their privacy any more. They had become human convenience stores, happy to have the contents of their heads available to the Bureau at any time of day. Why was the Bureau bothering to send their Inspectors? To keep on winning. Hour after hour. He certainly wouldn’t give Icara Swansong the satisfaction of knowing anything about how he was feeling. Though she kept asking. What would be the use of telling her? It would probably simply confirm the outcome of the last failed psych-evaluation.

He imagined the report she would write. Lucian Ffogg is going mad. He thinks the Bureau is a nest of conspirators.

Lucian was getting ready for his second processing shift. He watched her as she performed a digital survey of the buildings. What did the length of the guttering matter, for the sake of Scientifically Proven God! Who ever heard of needing guttering in the desert anyway? It was absurd. He could feel her pity him.

She’s pitying me because of the state of the guttering...

It was a look he usually didn’t have to endure because he had isolated himself so completely in his desert compound. And so much the better. This is why he could not abide other people. Pity was the worst of the emotions. It meant: ‘I know I’m better than you.’ It was the look he remembered getting from his mother’s friends, when he still wandered around the City disgraced, before he had fled to the glorious indifference of the desert, and Gurk’s deep-fried cooking.

He continued to watch the Inspector from a distance as he walked across the Lot.

‘You just wait and see,’ he whispered, ‘just wait and see what you become.’

Icara looked up from her crouched position, taking a soil sample. She had not heard him.

‘It’s not going to be vanilla-scented, that much is for sure. But you probably won’t notice because you’ll be up to your eyeballs in Government Issue Tranquelle. So you’ll feel like a candy bar with a gooey chocolate centre. But it won’t be real. Do you hear me?’

No she doesn’t. You’re whispering. And she’s running around on those sprightly young tendons of hers.

Lucian had noticed earlier that day that he had increased his stride, trying to keep up with her. It was no use. Tranquelle makes you go like an engine. And again, he remembered that he hadn’t taken any since ’88.

***

Icara had been taking every opportunity since she arrived to leave the Lot. The interiors made her feel claustrophobic. And Lucian was definitely hiding something. He gave her the creeps. Everything was wrong here. Something about the cavernous whale-carcass of the building was off. You could log into the Bureau servers and iRemember from anywhere in the State. Which might as well have been the world. It was all the world Icara knew. But out here, she couldn’t get a decent signal anywhere. Today of all days. When she was supposed to hear back from the Bureau’s Arc-Hive Supervisor.

She had requested all of the files on Lucian Ffogg. Everything on iRemember. iRemember remembered everything. There couldn’t be nothing on file. Every time she tried to access an engram – the endless spiralling circle. She was getting tired of waiting.

She didn’t feel safe out here. Noises were making her feel quite jumpy. She expected an Off-Gridder ambush at any moment. She felt for the tube of Liquid Scream and her service weapon in its holster.

Lucian’s psych-evaluation had not been flagged red by iRemember. If it had, the situation would have been much easier to deal with. She would have landed in the Lot, and, enacting Bureau Code Points 79-100 (Serving Employees whose Mental Processes Make Them Unsuitable for Service) she would have stuck an enormous hypodermic syringe deep into Lucian Ffogg’s neck. The Code outlined exactly what she would do with him then. None of it involved pretending to inspect the guttering or looking at rooms full of ancient computers.

The Lot had been flagged as part of a large interior operation. Nicknamed Project Eraser by the Board, it was an attempt to identify and erase any suspected corruption in the Bureau. It was a pet project of the Temple and was being spearheaded by the Bishop.

Only Inspectors with the highest academy scores and with unimpeachable records of comportment were selected to join Project Eraser. Icara had been among them.

She believed in iRemember. She loved the Bureau, that old concrete block, with a glass dome on top in the shape of a pre-frontal cortex. And as soon as she stepped into the Bureau building, she had known exactly what she wanted. She wanted to be architecturally elevated. Up on the top floors, with the decision makers. And eventually, she wanted to hit the ceiling. By which she meant she wanted to be at the very top. Sitting in Frome’s big green Chesterfield.

Icara was proud to be involved in Project Eraser. Partly because she thought it would get her closer to the top. But also because she really believed in iRemember. She believed that it was possible to make the City a better place. She believed in the rule of law and the importance of working for the greater good. The Bureau had always been beset by corruption. But in the ten years since Icara’s graduation from the Academy, there were increasing whispers that the Bureau was actively covering up criminal activity. Still only whispers. For the moment.

Icara was convinced that the Bureau was ultimately a good place. So it was a little dirty. That could be cleaned up. There was no place in the State for people like Lucian Ffogg. People who did not respect the rule of law. People who put the stability of the City in danger. People who fraternised with insurgents.

With Helena Frome leading it, the Bureau could never really be corruption free.

Frome was a drunk who took bribes and gave them as freely as Tranquelle pills – a leader willing to forget Bad Memories, at the right price, if she had a use for you in her system. Look at Fergus. Her head of media and digital advertising. A philandering ex-con. He had been fined on several occasions for trying to purchase firearms and combustion engines in the Sub-Urbs. Frome and her entire Cabinet belonged to the old guard. These were different times. And they would require a different leader. To really make the City a place of justice for all of its Citizens, the Bureau needed a replacement for Helena Frome. A leader who understood the needs of the Citizens. A leader who could sacrifice her own hedonistic pleasures for the good of said Citizens. A leader with a chignon, who had spent time in the desert, getting to know the dark side of iRemember.

Icara wouldn’t let herself think about who the most suitable candidate might be. After all, the Head of State was freely elected as part of a democratic process. But the less she tried to think about it, the more she blocked the desire out of her mind, the more of a narcotic hold it took. After she had tried not to think about being Head of State for two weeks, she wanted the leadership of the Bureau so badly she was regularly accidentally walking into Frome’s office when she arrived at work. She could taste the Bureau Bourbon. She could feel the itch of the grey woollen suit of office on her calves. When she went to sleep at night, the walnut interior of Frome’s office would slide across one pupil and then the other.

Even as she stood out here in the desert, alone with a dangerous insurgent type, the feel of the shagpile carpet in Frome’s office was at the back of her mind.

A digital Fibonacci vortex stared out at her from the screen. The files still wouldn’t download. There was something very wrong here. Frome’s administration had ensured the programme’s tendrils reached to every square inch of the State, like Tranquelle roots. The fact that Lot 458 seemed to be impervious to iRemember was in itself a cause for concern.

She had stayed away for too long. If she wasn’t careful, Mr Ffogg would figure things out. What would happen then? He was a known risk. She was out here with not so much as a Codex to hit him with. A crunch in the dust behind her made her jump. She half expected to see Mr Ffogg hanging over her, wielding one of his obsolete accounting machines. But it was nothing. Just a little yellow lizard, slithering from rock to rock, looking for cover. It darted out of sight into an exposed section of plastic piping.

She had wanted this. She had taken on the Board’s offer in part because of the fieldwork. She wanted to stretch herself. Really make a difference, beyond sitting at a desk. She wanted to catch the lizard of bribes and forgetting by the tail. Follow the darkness into its lair and weed it out. But out in the reality of the desert she wasn’t sure she was ready.