iRemember Read online

  He sat down in a broken old armchair that used to be Gurk’s. The seat was lumpy and slightly damp. There were probably silverfish sharing the cushions with him. This was an emergency. Most nights there was some emergency. But the invasion of Icara Swansong called for desperate measures. Lucian poured himself a tumbler of foul-smelling home-brew, which, along with the few iRemember files, he reserved for medical emergencies. He pulled on the visor.

  There was a fizzing sensation for a second. He felt his blood boil, as if he were disintegrating.

  And then it was March of his first year at the University.

  The campus felt like lukewarm tea. A young man with a side parting walked up the University steps. Well, not at first. At first the young man went up the steps of the local used transit-pod dealership, which people had warned him shared a similar dome and air of sobriety. But he soon corrected his error. And found himself on the University steps. Underneath his side parting hopes and dreams and memories of his first day at school jostled for space. He was nervous. A crooked smile flashed pristine teeth. Youthful teeth. Teeth with a spring in them. He hadn’t learned how to frown yet and the only grey thing about him was his suit. A suit his mother had bought for him. It was a suit he had not yet learned to be ashamed of.

  Students milled around him, but he could hardly see them. For him, the domed University building was a focal point. A monolith. The goal of his entire life – it glittered. Shiny, Valhalla-like in the March sunshine. The teat of knowledge. His eyes ran over the Latin letters above the doorway. The carvings of the founding Brethren in the lintel above the enormous cast-iron doors. He took a deep breath, felt the sweat cool slightly on his forehead, and stepped inside. The interior, heavy with pompous drapes and expensive hardwoods, opened up before Lucian like a chocolate box.

  In the darkness of the damp cellar Lucian’s ageing body shook and writhed with remembered motion and emotion. His heart palpitated. He would probably regret this in the morning.

  The next few months and years were missing. They were not engrams Lucian had wanted to save from iRemember. They had been miserable and for some reason he didn’t need iRemember to recall these perfectly at the drop of a hat. The chocolate box of university life was not all it was cracked up to be. As the days drew on, Lucian realised that someone must have eaten all the good ones and left nothing but marzipan and strawberry. The disappointments had begun in his first lecture and had continued, mercilessly, stripping him of his youthful sheen and gradually leaving a patina of disappointment. The only thing he wasn’t disappointed by was the knowledge. That was exactly what he had been expecting. The labs were full of dissected brains and microchips growing in petri dishes using the latest biosynthetic technology. They still called it Living Hardware because they were scientists and not salesmen. The term ‘Bioware’ would sell better, and would be coined by Fergus Plank, who had a genius for advertising, later.

  The Living Hardware was truly spectacular. The delicate pink sheen reminded Lucian of the bright pink beads of candy in sweetshops. The work was hard and alienating and this somehow made him love it all the more. But the people that surrounded this glorious, nuclear core of knowledge were just people. And in a few cases, not very nice people. They seemed to care very little about the Living Hardware, and more about the money the Living Hardware was bringing in – or not, as they frequently insinuated. They cared about kissing the feet of the Bureau Representatives, who were Frome’s golden boys, reflecting Government glory on every paper they published.

  Reality flooded Lucian’s perfect dream of research like bleach. Slowly, all the colours began to dilute and dribble. He couldn’t find anyone to talk to. People looked down on him because somewhere in his ancestry there had been a Belt Farmer and his mother wasn’t employed by the Bureau but by the Service Industry. He could find nothing in common with any of the various groups that roamed the campus. The loneliness depressed him. He retreated into himself. He holed himself up in his room.

  He wrote occasional emails to his mother in which he lied about friends, studies, everything. And his mother believed him, or didn’t – either way, she kept threatening to pull up his iRemember files and check he was telling the truth. But she didn’t. Lucian’s emails became ever more detailed, baroque and fussy. For a while he enjoyed it. It was almost as if he could escape into their alternate reality. He sank into them.

  He never told her he was missing home.

  His mother had told him that the universe would open up for him here. Instead it had contracted. It could fit inside his rented room, and the library. Occasionally it became so small that it could fit inside a single cup of coffee. He began to feel that time was crushing him. The beautiful dome of the University had become a concrete-vaulted butterfly net. It had become a heavy prison. And his work had become heavier, too. His theories were cumbersome, imperfect. His equations circular and meaningless. He was beginning to hate engrams and the Living Hardware looked less like boiled sweets and more like raw meat every day. He began to dread the labs like trips to an abattoir.

  Then an unimaginable thing happened. It was in ’87.

  After three sleepless nights, he wandered out of his room. Out of his mind. By mistake.

  The heavens opened. The sky lit up, gold and red. A comet flashed in the heavens. A shooting star fell and landed right in Lucian’s lap. Life was beautiful and filled with colour again. The crowds still grimaced beneath his window. But he was closer to understanding them. His universe had opened out again. He had found a satellite. He had found his own solar system. Her name was Emily. She was not the solar system, thought Lucian at the time. No, she was the sun – she was the source of all light and beauty in the world. She was studying ancient languages and she had hair the colour of melted gold.

  These were the engrams that Lucian had painstakingly detached from his iRemember files. These were the memories he was nursing in the cellar of Lot 458. He watched them in no particular order. Chunks were missing. He had retained only a few glimpses that he would cherish and observe like expensive jewellery.

  She shimmered in Lucian’s memory. Emily in Fred’s bar, with her back to him; a pink plastic flower in a glass vase near her left hand. She turned slowly, and knocked the vase over, her hair hanging over her face, a waterfall of blonde.

  The blonde was from a bottle. This was one of the many things that Lucian didn’t know about Emily. He still didn’t know in the cellar of Lot 458. He also didn’t know that ignorance was bliss.

  Things went well for a while and Lucian’s studies went well as a result. He had already been accepted (there had been no formal letter, but he had received several informal pats on the back from senior members of the faculty) to do graduate student work in the recently founded ACRONYM, the prestigious Adelberger Centre for Recall, Outbrains and Neo-Yield Mnemonics – an offshoot of the Neuroscience lab, and the Vice-Chancellor’s favourite acronym, which he had come up with in the bath. The lab was founded by Simon Adelberger, but funded indirectly by a powerful chemical magnate who sat in Frome’s Cabinet. For Lucian, the work with outbrains would be a dream come true. And for the lab, Lucian was the dream meal ticket – the graduate student developing new and exciting codes that would change neuro-technology and iRemember forever. Paradigm. Shifted.

  Suddenly, with Emily’s arrival, he was winning grants for his research into a protein he had isolated in Tranquelle stalks. Everything was going swimmingly, and Lucian Ffogg felt fantastic.

  But the rose-tinted dream of happiness was blown away, like dust from a mantelpiece. Or petals from the bedspread he had shared with Emily.

  There is nothing surprising about what happened next. Lucian Ffogg is now an ageing CMO, trapped in a Memory Processing Plant with an illegal Lethene business on the side. So somewhere, something must have gone wrong.

  To this day, he does not know how exactly it happened, or why.

  Emily disappeared. She cleared o
ut of his life. Leaving him feeling like pitted fruit.

  Now, in the cellar of the processing plant, Lucian tried to play back the files that had images of her face and recall how looking at that face had made him feel. But the only file that would play with no distortion was an engram of the curve of her back. And the bright, plastic flowers in Fred’s bar. On the night when she disappeared.

  He pulled off the visor.

  Why did he keep doing this to himself? Wouldn’t it be better to forget? He should get rid of these engrams. Pull the plug, and really practise what he preached to the Off-Gridders. The doe-eyed idealistic ones who came to purchase freedom from Frome’s memory banks from him.

  He thought about pulling the plug now. Letting the Bioware drain away.

  And then he put the visor back on and replayed the last night again.

  That had been the beginning of the end. He felt his eyes wet under the visor. His old body dry-heaved.

  When he pulled off the visor hours later with the searchlight of dawn poking through the cellar gratings, the feeling he was left with was that he had misplaced his keys. Only the keys were Emily. Emily was decidedly dismembered. A fragmented presence that floated everywhere, and existed nowhere. She refused to be whole.

  Maybe it would have been better for Lucian if she had remained that way.

  ***

  You could have fried an egg on the roof of Hangar 1. It was early in the year, not long after Fromemass, a national holiday, yet the desert sun made the metal heat-hum like a singing dune.

  A bird circled in the sky, then, deciding that the place was too desolate to bother, it flew off again.

  The compound was quieter than usual.

  This was because it was lunchtime.

  In the mess hall (a place truly disgusting enough to warrant the name) that had been designed for 300 men in orange overalls, Lucian and Icara sat. Two lone masticators. At separate tables.

  Icara had been keen that they should say grace. She had reminded him of that fateful day in his youth, well before she had even been born, of the Government facility where the scientists had finally uncovered the presence of a divine being. Lucian had never been much of a believer. And a five-star rating from the Bureau wasn’t about to make him suddenly genuflect in worship. Icara insisted on saying grace.

  Now they sat forty feet apart, in front of their trays. Chewing. In silence.

  Icara didn’t seem to mind.

  Lucian, on the other hand, was seething. And not just because of a lack of sleep or being made to pray. Something had to be done. As he stabbed at the reconstituted Government Issue protein mash with a fork, he ardently wished to burn the Government Inspector on a pyre of Bureau Codes. Sadly, as had also been proved by Frome’s Committee for Truth in Literature, manuscripts, especially digital ones like the Code, don’t burn.

  Lucian’s glare was making the Government Inspector feel uncomfortable. She had tried to be pleasant. But Lucian was surely planning some kind of attack. So much rage and aggression.

  Why do some people find it so difficult to accept the rule of law? The Bureau Code was written to improve the life of employees. Like iRemember is improving the life of each and every Citizen. Even Lucian Ffogg. No matter how much he hates it.

  The constant unease and fear was draining. She still hadn’t heard from the Board.

  She was looking forward to the end of the day. Some quiet time with a nice Tranquelle vape. Maybe a True Crime series or two. She would certainly not be checking her messages every half an hour until daybreak. She certainly wasn’t checking them now.

  Still nothing.

  She was beginning to wonder what she was going to do if she never heard back from the Board. She was stuck out here, among the dunes and succulents and lizards. With a murderous insurgent. What if she died here? What if Lucian Ffogg murdered her with his fork and buried her somewhere in Lot 458? Would iRemember remember? Would Helena Frome remember? Would the City care if it had one green suit less?

  The protein mash slid like stones down the Government Inspector’s throat. Icara stared at the chewing madman, her eyes growing gradually wider. He was ageing, but he still looked sprightly enough. Maybe he was mad enough to attempt murder?

  Lucian felt a warm pressure at his temples, and the prickle of sweat.

  She’s staring again. Always observing. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?

  Finally, unable to bear the idea of being watched any longer, he let his fork clatter to the table in frustration. He pushed the tray away, leaving the rest of the mash untouched, and folded his arms in front of him.

  ‘Eat your protein mash, Mr Ffogg. Good, balanced nutrition. Recommended by the Board of Health.’

  Lucian ignored her.

  ‘It’s good for you,’ she added. Lucian tried harder to ignore her.

  ‘Need water,’ he said in a half whisper, before getting up. He walked through the lines of benches and tables to the far wall of the mess hall, where a tiny grey fridge was secreted in a corner. Moss had taken hold behind it. From its dank recesses he pulled out a bottle with the orange and gold Government logo on its side. Regulation water with added electrolytes – and fluoride for strong teeth your Board of Health could be proud of. As he unscrewed the plastic lid, the crack of the seal reverberated around the hall, bouncing from steel beam to steel beam. The sound remained up in the rafters for some time before finally escaping through a hole in the roof as a kind of whistle.

  He needed to get rid of the illegal Tranquelle plants, the barrels of Lethene and his makeshift distillery before she got around to inspecting the back of the compound. That’s what he should have been doing last night, instead of hooking himself up to iRemember like some kind of junkie. He left the Government Inspector chewing in silence, disgusted with himself.

  ***

  After lunch there were inkblot tests and tests to do with physical fitness. Lucian failed some and passed others. He was doing better than the building, which was failing the clean air tests and tests for dangerous engram radiation. The Government Inspector’s curiosity was seemingly bottomless.

  She followed Lucian everywhere. Like a bright green, vanilla-scented shadow. He could not break away for a moment. And he was sure he could hear, in the distance of the desert, Off-Gridders making their way to the compound. He convinced himself he could feel their bare feet padding softly across the dunes.

  Icara watched him as he stared out across the Lot. She watched him as he cleared a bird’s nest from the generator. She watched him stacking memory sticks into cool-boxes. She observed as he trundled these boxes over the desert ground. She followed him into the hangars, the Arc-Hives, several times over.

  Lucian’s panic slowly grew. He wrestled with it, but it kept coming back. He hadn’t sold any Lethene for months. Either all the insurgents in Desert Ring 2 had been arrested – which wasn’t good – or a visit was imminent. Which was worse. If their paths crossed with that of Icara Swansong, nothing good would happen.

  The hangars – of which there were six, three on either side of the central control tower – housed thousands of black servers; monoliths with one blinking green eye each. A system of artificial arteries pumped coolant and a high-sugar solution around the memory sticks – keeping the past alive. A mechanical life-support system. The servers were slotted into shelving units, and covered the area of a football pitch in both directions: up and across. They were kept from overheating by a relentless, arctic breeze from the air-conditioning units. White strip lights on the ceiling cast a clinical glow. The servers had been fitted with silencers, making the hangars sound less like industrial refrigerators, and more like peaceful meadows that had sprouted a cyborg henge. The monoliths looked like hunched elders, peppered with the spines of memory sticks. Docked. Dormant. Forever.

  The cleanliness, the sybaritic lack of dust of these artificial caverns, was in sharp contr
ast to the stained organic mess of the control tower where Lucian lived. Nothing lived here. Instead, petrified thoughts slept in permafrost. Sedated memories in straitjackets. When Lucian had first arrived at Lot 458, the sound in the hangars reminded him of what dormitories sound like at night. Like people asleep. He had developed the habit of padding around now, trying not to wake anyone. As if you could wake disembodied engrams. As if you could wake the dead. Still he did it, out of respect. Icara’s stilettos and their orgy of noise felt obscene in the sanctum of the Arc-Hives. He winced as he heard her following him. It was as if he could hear the noise on a molecular level. One cell grating on another cell. Then the whole creaking heel breaking the surface tension of the concrete floor. Once or twice he turned around abruptly and held a finger to his lips. Icara looked at him over the rims of her glasses and gave a little nod. But it was no use. The racket continued. Lucian was glad when the last memory stick was in its dock, and he could finally chaperone the Government Inspector out into the desert.

  After the arctic air of the hangar, outside felt like hot wax. Lucian was used to the sudden change in temperature. It came with living in Desert Ring 2. He noted with glee that the change made Icara wince. Having seen the minute change in the facial landscape of the Government Inspector, Lucian felt a renewed sense of vigour. The first fissure in the perfect green Government vase. This was a war of attrition. There would be trenches dug in the hallways of the control tower. Maybe she would disintegrate with one temperature change too many.

  But the enemy countered brilliantly.

  ‘I have not seen your weather station, Mr Ffogg. They are usually installed somewhere along the periphery of the Lots. But I haven’t found yours. Would you take me to it please?’

  Lucian felt the prickle of panic begin to shimmy up his neck again.

  The weather station was at the far end of the Lot. Next to the Tranquelle farm. He had repurposed it to synthesise Lethene. It would be obvious, even to a Government employee who didn’t believe in Lethene. There were bright blue barrels spilling blue toxic contents and Tranquelle pod husks fermenting in weather station beakers.