iRemember Read online

  ‘There was a storm.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Mr Ffogg. It is a weather station. Designed to record the weather. Storms included.’

  ‘There was a storm. So, there’s no weather station.’

  ‘Well how would you know there was a storm if you don’t have a weather station?’

  ‘It...blew the weather station away...’

  ‘And what measures have you taken to replace the missing weather station? You are aware, as per point 319 of the Code that you signed upon acceptance of your Government position, that airborne mnemonic particles can have adverse and unforeseen effects on the weather – in particular cloud formation and static electricity. Which can in turn lead to...’

  She was waiting for him to finish point 319.

  Lucian remembered it perfectly. Lightning fields. Storms. Massive Catastrophic Server Failure. Possible Total Recall. But if he recited this she would know something was wrong.

  Silence was resistance, for the second time that week.

  ‘...Sent an email for it to be repaired...’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A year ago.’

  Icara lowered the glasses a fraction.

  ‘Do you realise, Mr Ffogg, that I am recording this conversation? That all of this is...well...on the record?’

  Lucian knew very well. But he and Gurk had been working on making the Lot a black spot in Frome’s surveillance network too long and too hard to let some rookie Bureaucrat crumble everything into dust. Lot 458 was a blank space. Thirty agonising years of engendering oblivion would not disintegrate just like that. They couldn’t.

  Icara mistook the grim set of Lucian’s features for arrogance. As if a broken-down weather station was ever something to feel arrogantly proud of.

  ‘I see,’ she said. The nice-guy routine had finally run its course. This ‘I see’ was the conversational equivalent of smashing a bottle on the side of a table before sticking the pointy end into someone’s neck.

  ‘I think,’ said Icara, ‘that concludes my work for today. We can continue tomorrow. Bright and early. And hopefully do much better.’

  She turned on her pointed, green, stiletto heel, and disappeared into the control tower. Lucian, who was still pushing a cool-box in front of him, waited for the door of the control tower to close. And then he completely lost his one remaining atom of patience.

  He tossed the cool-box on its side, kicked it, and tore at his beard and hair.

  ‘B...bl...’ The word gurgled at the back of his throat for a while. It finally came up for air. His frustration. A choked scream.

  ‘BLOODY WOMAN! AND YOUR BLOODY WEATHER STATION! DAMN YOUR EYES! AND YOUR I-SPY-WITH-MY-BLOODY-LITTLE-EYE-5200! AND DAMN WHATEVER TRANQUELLE-TOKING IDIOT OF A BUREAU MASTURBATOR SENT YOU TO RUIN MY WEEK! SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN GOD DAMN HELENA FROME. DAMN HER AND HER SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN GOD! SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO...SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN HECK!’

  Some of his words were hurled back at him – boomerang-fashion – by desert rock formations. And then there was silence. He spat. He stamped where he spat.

  His powerlessness in the face of Frome’s all-seeing, all-knowing Bureau was making him feel sick. Thirty years of painstakingly lining every beam, every wall and ceiling tile with Lethene. For what?!…

  The door of the control tower creaked open a fraction. Icara’s perfectly groomed coif emerged.

  ‘Did you say something, Mr Ffogg?’

  What did it matter what a battered old CMO with only a few miles left in him said or thought? What did it matter? Emily had gone. His mother had gone. Gurk had gone. Even the Off-Gridders had gone. The City had won. Lucian seethed. Only this time in silence.

  ‘No? Good. Come and help me locate...’ she mumbled something hi-tech. The syllables were whipped away by the desert wind.

  Lucian hung his head in defeat. He picked up the trolley from where it lay in the dust. He dragged it limply behind him as he made his way to the control tower.

  He had not wanted to admit it to himself, because he was sure he could run this alone. But without Gurk, he was...vulnerable. Time and technology had changed since he’d last been in the lab. With Off-Gridder help, he and Gurk had managed to fool the Bureau. But the truth was that Lucian had run out of string. He couldn’t do it alone. Not with Bureaucrats digging into every inch of his affairs. The game was up.

  He had been a sitting duck since Gurk died. It had only been a matter of time.

  Now maybe the time had come to stop treading water. And to disappear.

  ***

  Nothing disappeared in iRemember. Not really. It was Frome’s personal film of her City. The most boring but most viewed theatrical release in history. A Government production in which everyone had a starring role.

  The memory project had not always been a Government-run operation. In fact, it had its inception in individual entrepreneurship, when a small start-up called iRemember began developing an app. Really the start-up was one girl in her mother’s basement. But the idea gradually grew until a company was founded, with swanky offices in a valley somewhere, the exact geographical location of which is one of the few things to have been lost to iRemember.

  It was originally touted as a glorified storage system, replacing the need for family photographs. It aimed to ensure that important personal and childhood memories could be encoded digitally and then stored. Permanently. Perpetually. With no decay. No forgetting. Indefinitely incorruptible. Forever.

  Perfect Memories, Perfectly Preserved. That was iRemember’s large-print tagline.

  With the small-print proviso that anything uploaded onto iRemember is the property of iRemember in perpetuity and cannot be bought, sold, or replicated without explicit permission from iRemember.

  And it was a wonderful dream. Who wouldn’t want perfect recall? Our memories ultimately determine who we are. They are the contents of our hard drives, the contents of our heads. They are the things we learn from. Or don’t. They are the things that make us happy or sad. They hold the places and people we know and love and know we know. And even some that we don’t know we love until much later. These are all things that we want to hold on to. Keep safe.

  iRemember provided people with the perfect opportunity to do just that. Keep everything they had ever thought of, every memory they had ever formed. Pristine and permanent, like a freshly printed banknote. Only, unlike currency, you could reuse these banknotes over and over again.

  The reason that memories degrade is, after all, only down to faulty hardware and a lack of storage space. New memories push old ones out, or adhere to them like parasitic plants, sucking them dry of life and substance. Something neuroscientists in the old days called disturbance ensures that each time our memories resurface, they shape-shift. This means that all of human memory is crooked. Degraded. False. The heart of every memory, the reality behind it, gradually withers, until it disappears altogether. Real memories are replaced with plastic versions of themselves. And over time, even these false copies, the triumphant evil twins, vanish. This process of perpetual loss, building to a moment of complete wipe-out, can be very distressing.

  In this environment, naturally, iRemember was a huge success.

  At least at first.

  Until the users realised an uncomfortable truth. Which was that perpetual mnemonic motion, endless forgetting, was ultimately a positive thing. Disappointed University professors, policemen, nurses, librarians, frustrated husbands, frustrated wives, frustrated musicians, cheerleaders, baristas – that is to say everyone – soon realised that perfect recall wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Memories misremembered were a source of great joy to people revisiting them. More often than not they were full of gingerbread houses, soft toys, and sunshine. iRemember unmasked the bleak reality. A well-remembered past was sometimes no easy place to revisit. Crisp, clear and disappoin
ting. And full of bad memories as well as good ones.

  No one could have predicted it. The company faltered. Profits dwindled. Eventually, the software developer who had originally written the code that was capable of encoding human hopes and dreams as if they were no more than insurance statistics or some other innocuous data, had to sell iRemember off. She found that, as well as revolutionary software, she had succeeded in developing a peptic ulcer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and an incurable sense of disappointment to boot.

  In short, the whole iRemember debacle was an affair everyone would rather forget.

  An opportunity to do this soon presented itself. The entire venture, codes and all, was sold to a mysterious telephone bidder, for a price far below what iRemember was really worth.

  Much like perfect recall, selling up seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Nevertheless, it was sold.

  The mysterious bidder turned out to be a deputy chairman of a secret Government committee.

  Many decades later, the original software had gone through several permutations. It was now iRemember 231.0. And it belonged to the Bureau. Which belonged to Helena Frome. As did everything else.

  Property of iRemember. Remember? Why does no one ever read the small print?

  It had functionality and reach far beyond what the original developer envisioned for the little baby in swaddling codes. It had become a tyrannical system of constant surveillance, a nightmare of perfect preservation which perpetuated the widening gap between the Citizens and their ruling classes. Far from allowing you constant access to carbon copies of your dead grandma, it instead allowed for Helena Frome to have a front-row seat inside your head. The developer would have turned in her grave to see her glorious, shiny, technical innovation grow into ponderous middle age. To be watched over by a ponderous, middle-aged technician like Lucian Ffogg.

  Whom we left only moments ago. Trapped in a memory farm with Government Inspector Icara Swansong. Who in turn was trapped in the desert with a suspected insurgent Lucian Ffogg.

  ***

  Icara ran a manicured fingernail down the clip-pad, searching for Government missives.

  Still nothing.

  She realised she missed the City. Desperately. She missed the damp and the efficiency of the transport system. She missed the Superloop, the shock of air and the whumping sound it made as it hurled her towards the Government building at 06:30 every morning.

  She missed glass. And concrete. She missed the lack of sand, dust, screeching insects, snakes, or ghosts or whatever it was that made those horrible natural sounds.

  She missed her office chair. The smell of the corridors of the Bureau.

  She scratched behind her ear. Gritty. Desert Ring 2 was a nightmare. And Lot 458 was a cesspit. Full of germs no amount of Government Issue Disinfect would make disappear. She had placed her camp-bed right in the middle of the room – it was the spot her touch-pad told her had the lowest bacterial count. Still alarmingly high.

  How could a person live like this?

  So far she had found 160 contraventions of Code. That might be enough to recommend a host of additional staff, but alone it was not enough for Project Eraser.

  She decided to concentrate on typing up her findings and not think about the fact that night had fallen and she was alone in the desert with a criminal mastermind.

  Lucian Ffogg...criminal mastermind?

  The longer she spent with the alleged insurgent, the more she felt that he couldn’t be who the Bureau said he was.

  What did she know about him so far? From the sparse iRemember files she had managed to download there was nothing particularly shocking. Nothing impossibly corrupt. There was a badly cobbled together artificial engram of Lucian’s daily activities. It was a patch. You could tell it was one engram on a loop. It was a basic and not very good patch. And it had worked about as well as a card trick. Fooling iRemember for a while. But eventually human intelligence had cottoned on.

  So, we have a CMO without a recorded memory. But what else?

  There had been nothing Icara could spot around the Lot to suggest ‘dangerous insurgent activity.’ She had been led to believe that Lucian Ffogg was building iRemember-missiles and fraternising with huge bands of rebels, whose ringleader he had become.

  There was nothing in Lot 458, as far as Icara could see, but a sad, lonely little man.

  Her ISpis hadn’t detected any heat sources in a 10-mile radius. If he was a ringleader, Icara suspected the ring was one man in diameter.

  There was also a summary of his early career. A secretary had trawled through hours and hours of iRemember footage for her.

  A promising postgraduate engrammer at the University in ’87, before the end of his studies in ’88, Lucian had fallen suddenly out of favour. The secretary had helpfully appended some before and after screen-shots from the Arc-Hives but had not included any detailed information as to why or what had happened. Instead, Icara scrolled through pages and pages of irrelevant material, most of it relating to the embarrassing medical history of Lucian’s mother. Icara winced and chose to ignore these.

  There were a few records of conversations between Gurk and Lucian when he first arrived at Lot 458. These were perhaps the most incriminating, including clear violations of the Code, blasphemy, open mockery of Helena Frome and other frowned-upon activities. But Icara had heard Cabinet Bureaucrats joking about the smell of Bureau Bourbon as they walked past Frome’s office, and while it was frowned upon, it was hardly something to write to the Brethren about.

  There wasn’t much to build a case on. There was so much missing.

  She wished she had gone through the Arc-Hives herself. She would have done a much better job of it. Trying to write without the extra information was useless and now it just looked like the Board were ignoring her. She could see she had managed to connect to iRemember. The little icon at the top of the touch-screen pad was flashing purple.

  She would take another look around the grounds in the morning, before Lucian got up. Maybe she would even go that night.

  She wondered whether she would find anything.

  Maybe there’s nothing to find. Which begs the question, why did they send me here? I’m starting to wonder if the Brethren want to clear up the Bureau at all.

  She gave up and turned on her Tranquelle vape.

  The report, the Brethren, the Bureau and corruption, the nasty blue light in the room in Desert Ring 2 – all of it disappeared in a pink dream. Icara’s bed became a warm meadow full of red flowers.

  Vapour hung in the air around the body of the Government Inspector. Unmoving.

  Thoughts of a cover-up by the Bureau and the Brethren disappeared.

  ***

  There was a Bureau cover-up. Of course. But it wasn’t the kind of cover-up the Inspector thought it was. Lucian Ffogg may not have been entirely guilty, but he was far from innocent. While Icara frolicked in her Tranquelle-induced Garden of Eden, Lucian was outside. Sitting on a large boulder at the far end of the Lot. Smoking an illegal tobacco roll-up. Looking over his small crop of Tranquelle plants and his Lethene lab. The seeds, he recalled, had been hard to come by. Genetically modified and patented by the Bureau, they were programmed to die as soon as they germinated if they weren’t watered with Government Issue plant food. Gurk had obtained some ‘cracked’ copies, from a particularly shady Off-Gridder. Covered in wearable tech. He’d given Lucian the creeps. But they had grown, and now provided natural shade and cover for the outdoor lab, hidden behind a stony outcrop and sunk into the ground, in a natural crater. He smiled as he watched the evening sky dripping with red, like a well-rested artificial steak.

  He loved it out here. As lonely as he was and as irritable as he had become, the desert had been his home. Thirty years of sunsets and sunrises. Thirty years of dodging Helena Frome.

  You’ve had a good run, Lucian. iRemember mi
ght not remember you as the man who felled the Empire, but at least you gave a lot of angry people the right to be forgotten and the right to forget. And at least they left you alone. Mostly.

  A few clouds scudded, unable to make up their minds whether to stay or go, or indeed what shape to take on their journey. Gradually the deep redness gave way to a blue-tinged darkness. He watched the desert he loved fall into nocturnal oblivion. Like a cookie being dipped into a cup of coffee.

  Night came. And with it salvation. Salvation to be found by means of much digging – such was the will of Scientifically Proven God.

  ***

  The pink haze of sunset reached the City, just as Desert Ring 2 was turning dark.

  The Temple stretched up into the sky like a big, pink popsicle, reflecting twilight.

  The Brethren in the Temple were busy engaged in their Vesper-Rustle. An orgy of paper-worship.

  They had done this for centuries, after a major philosophical breakthrough had given rise to their existence.

  In the beginning was the Word, the ancients had contended. But the Brethren noted that for there to be a Word, it had to be written on something. They had discussed this in open fora and agreed that it was only reasonable to base their new and better belief system on a slight paraphrase – which Scientifically Proven God would have doubtless put in there himself, had he not been too busy, and forgotten.

  In the very beginning was paper. Paper was sacred. Paper had been the basis of an ancient system of economy. It had been the entire storage system for a pre-digital age. It had been an epoch’s memory. Crucial to the Arc-Hives, to the whole system of Government. Without paper, things fell apart.

  Now that paper was scarce, their belief system gained gravitas. Paper was like white gold.

  Helena Frome herself didn’t care much for the Brethren’s particular brand of superstition. But the Citizens seemed to like it. She didn’t know if they believed it. Sometimes she wondered whether the Brethren believed in it themselves. But it seemed to bring everyone comfort. It brought the Citizens comfort too. To think that their spiritual and moral lives were being taken in hand, carefully documented and looked after by an upstanding, careful third party with a well-thought-out appeals procedure.