iRemember

  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?