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  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 anyo
ne 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, th
e 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.