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  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 a
nything 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.

  Icara was used to being alone. She had no problem with solitude per se. But the quiet and emptiness of Desert Ring 2 was eerie. It was the lack of City noise and the absence of crowds of strangers going about their daily civic business that was disconcerting.

  Nothing but sand, winds, and a dangerous, angry old man.

  It was going to be a long week.

  ***

  The Inspector was wrong about the desert. It was full of all kinds of things apart from sand and wind. There were succulent plants, for example. Strange insects. Some of them edible. Even water, if you knew where to look. And she might have been wrong about Lucian too. He was a little angry. But mostly he was miserable.

  When the Government Inspector retired for her first sleep in Lot 458, Lucian hid in the dank mildewed cellars, pretending he was replacing fuses.

  He wasn’t.

  Before he and Gurk had pulled the plug on iRemember, he had rescued a few engrams from his file. As a memento. He hadn’t told Gurk about this. Because Gurk would have told him he was being weak. You either wanted to get rid of iRemember or you didn’t. Gurk had seen things in black and white. Lucian did want to get rid of iRemember. Except for those few engrams. Gurk had been strong. Stronger than Lucian. He didn’t need any. Lucian had tried to do without the engrams he’d saved. Now, he only came down here in emergencies.

  He had built his engrams their own life support system, but, because they were not plugged into the well-maintained Government servers, the heat was gradually eroding them. There were sections of memory where the faces and clothes of those involved had become thin and filmy, so that when you ran the files you were seeing the world through the gauze of a sock. A world made of jittering, gradually disappearing ghosts. Without the Tranquelle, there was no sound or smell of course. And the apples were tasteless. Yet, even this heat-haze of a world was an infinitely superior copy to the one he had in his head.