iRemember Page 7

  The light the burning hangars cast was other-worldly. And the heat was unbelievable. The smoke and flame coiled into the sky, like unwinding copper cables. Like Helena Frome’s unfurling hair.

  Eventually, even Lucian had to concede that there was nothing to be done.

  Together he and Icara watched the red alarm light circle and flash. One bloodshot, rolling eye. The alarm filled the desert with its strange, high-pitched music, like the call of an enormous artificial bird.

  Citizens’ well-documented lives were evaporating into the midnight sky. And Lucian and Icara were both thinking the same thing: how could this have happened? In a hangar unit chilled to a frosty 10 degrees. In the middle of the night.

  ***

  Helena Frome came to from the anaesthetic.

  The doctors were good. And the anaesthetic had been good.

  An artificial, little death.

  Dawn gnawed at the window.

  As she had predicted, she was back in her office. Like waking into a bad dream.

  The ache around her belly was nothing she had not felt before. It had become so persistent and pervasive that she hardly noticed it any more.

  A blinking light on her desk told her it was done.

  Frome had grown and nurtured iRemember. iRemember was not something you could just switch off. But neither were Bad Memories.

  Good and Bad. They were two sides of the same Frome dollar.

  People’s heads were just as full of bad memories as good ones. Frome had always known this. But she had also known that the people mustn’t know. The Desert had been an excellent hiding place. Since...oh, about ’88. The City had been making good money from the localised and controlled production of Lethene. There were some Cabinet members, some Bureaucrats high up in the ranks, Scientifically Proven Hell, even a few Brethren, who had paid through the nose to keep their Bad Memories Off-Grid.

  She had been clever. Had made the Off-Gridder bastards work for her, since they were so intent on working against her, by subsuming their little operation and using it to cover up her own, much more profitable one. Little Brother, the new up-start Bishop, seemed intent on stopping this very comfortable source of revenue by switching off the tap, and opening up nasty little enquiries into corruption, left, right and centre. With Little Brother sticking his holier-than-thou, cold, papery fingers into her every pie, she was running out of hiding places. There was no option but to blow everything up and start again.

  She would speak to Nobody in the morning.

  It was a shame that Icara had fallen in with them. She had been shaping up to be just what a Swansong should be. But she had swallowed Little Brother’s big hook like a smaller fish. It showed she was more naive than Frome thought. More like her mother...damned DNA.

  If she could wake up from one more dosage of anaesthetic to laugh in Little Brother’s face when his crusade backfired on him, she might allow herself to die happy.

  A rasping, grating sound filled the office for a minute as Frome imagined his downfall.

  Helena Frome was laughing.

  ***

  Morning cracked the night open like a pigeon egg and revealed the carnage the fire had wrought.

  Lucian decided to find out exactly what damage had been done, since the Inspector he had taken to mentally calling ‘The houseplant from the City’ was lost without her Bureau buddies helping her to decide what to do, clinging to her every beep.

  Lucian doubted very much that the rule book held any useful information on what to do in a catastrophe like this. Even if it did, he would ignore it. He decided to start in Hangar 4.

  Icara followed him.

  A charred hole in the wall told them that the fire had made its way in here, but had been stopped by the sprinkler system. The emergency lights bounced off server granite. The winking green lights were turned off. As if the hulking monoliths had closed their eyes. Lucian felt a pall of sadness in the air. The buzzing whisper of a dormitory had been replaced by the silence of the necropolis. Molten plastic hulks loomed in the half-light. A choking fog of smoke particles circled. Lucian half expected to see wraiths and spectres swoop out and envelop them. The air was stuffy. The servers had failed.

  Icara was letting Lucian lead the way because she felt rooted to the spot by a leaden feeling of panic. It crunched in her abdomen like snow. Raw panic tingling its way up from her fingertips.

  How had this happened? What could be salvaged? What could be saved? What could be done? Her secret report and her secret mission would be impossible to complete. There was nothing left. She had come out here for nothing. After this there would forever be a stigma around her, like a cloud. The Brethren might not trust her to work on another case. Not for a while anyway. They were incredibly superstitious.

  As they walked, the enormity of server damage was impossible to take in. A short stop by each server revealed the same mournful scene. Soft melted edges. Bioware pooled. In some places it had baked into the concrete leaving deep, black stains. In other places it remained damp, fizzing. The life evaporating away. The floor of Hangar 4 looked like 5pm at the Glitz abattoir.

  Lucian checked each hangar in turn.

  When he was relatively sure it was safe, he made his way into Hangar 3. Icara followed. There was nothing else to do now.

  They walked around in the inside-out hangar. The sky, exposed by the fallen roof, looked strange and far away, but cast a strong light.

  ‘Maybe you should turn those ISpIs back on. You might see something important.’

  If this was a planned Off-Gridder attack, thought Lucian, why didn’t I know about it? Why didn’t I see it coming? Why didn’t they ask? And if it wasn’t the Off-Gridders, then what happened? Servers don’t just go bang in the night.

  They stopped at the last line of servers before the back wall.

  ‘Do you think it was a technical fault?’

  ‘I’m more than thorough with the server maintenance, thank you. Don’t think a fault could cause a hole that size, do you?’ he pointed at the side of a server. ‘And it certainly wouldn’t have left that circular series of scorch marks across the floor.’

  ‘Do you think I should test for contaminants? Do you think it was...insurgents?’

  Lucian rolled his eyes. The hushed tone of the word insurgents irritated him.

  Who were they letting into the Bureau now? Cowards in green suits!

  ‘That wouldn’t be a bad idea, Inspector. Are you sure you’re an Inspector and that they didn’t just send you here as a joke?’

  The barbed comment stung. Why had she asked him for permission anyway? It was probably his own sabotage activities that had resulted in this.

  ‘If you consent to this and I find that this was your doing, Mr Ffogg, I will be obliged to report straight to the Temple. Bypassing even the Bureau. I hope you understand that.’

  She pulled the stylus from her touch pad and prodded gingerly at the area near the server.

  It was picking up something. But nothing iRemember had any information on.

  Lucian had moved away from the gaping hole on the side of the server and was trying to prise the melted hunks of memory stick away from their dock stations.

  ‘iRemember can’t identify the substance.’

  ‘Then it’s an inside job.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Helena Frome has been following the insurgents and Off-Gridder cells so closely for so many years now that they don’t make anything she doesn’t know about. iRemember should be full of everything and anything explosive the insurgents could produce.’

  Icara looked up from the scorched concrete.

  ‘Why would Helena Frome blow up one of her own Processing Compounds, Mr Ffogg? I’m not sure you understand how running a government works.’

  Anger flared.

  ‘No, Inspector. I understand v
ery well. I understand that a woman who stole my research on Lethene and ended my career, a woman able to withstand at least forty assassination attempts at the last count, and a woman who manages to keep Big Brother on a short leash, wouldn’t be averse to blowing up one of her own servers if it was in her inter...’

  Research? What research was Lucian Ffogg capable of doing? It was pathetic. Icara had wanted to interrupt him and tell him he was delusional if he believed in fairy stories like Lethene. Not only was he delusional. He was old and bitter. But she didn’t have time to say any of what was on her mind.

  And Lucian didn’t have time to finish the sentence.

  It sounded like water boiling, when it happened. Hot Bioware gushed from a docking station with such force and pressure that it seared Lucian’s left arm like a leg of lamb. There was a flash of pink and green. He began to shake uncontrollably. A buzz, like static electricity, travelled up under his skin. Lucian Ffogg was crawling. His dermis was crawling away from him.

  Icara was too disgusted to scream. Too appalled to do anything but helplessly watch. She had seen this happen before. In an old information video she had switched on by accident at the Academy, a video that her mother’s generation had to watch as children when iRemember had been younger and the engrams more volatile. It had left her with a feeling of curiosity mixed with horror when she had seen it on her Academy visor. In low resolution. With no emotion sensors on.

  Now the scene made her teeth stand on edge.

  She did not think this kind of thing was still possible. Not after all the health and safety tests the Bioware would have had to go through. Not after all the measures that the State had put in place to ensure that the workers were safe.

  Lucian had seen the same video. His eyes were wide with horror. All the Lethene in the world wouldn’t get rid of this memory. He started to scream. But it didn’t last long.

  He heard what sounded like a blister popping.

  And that was the last normal thing he remembered.

  Until later.

  When he remembered too much.

  The Rest:

  Other People

  Lucian Ffogg had arrived in Lot 458 seeking out oblivion, hoping to forget.

  And it is a truth universally known, and acknowledged by the Brethren, that the worst thing that can happen to you in your life, is to get the thing you most want...

  Cold and hot. And, for some reason, gherkins.

  He bit me. I can’t believe he bit me. Shaking wrist. Shock worse than pain.

  No. Summer rain in Memorial Park, dripping down the glass panels on the Temple. I wouldn’t want to live in there, with my life on display. But it is beautiful when you look at it from down here.

  A child with bright green eyes wandering around the Superloop terminal like a thief with its hands in its pockets.

  No. Children in the summer rain.

  No. Horrid red, dripping. All over my wrist. Where he bit me when I tried to lift.

  I wore a beautiful hat that day. I bought it in that little shop on the high street.

  No. Summer rain. Nothing but soaking, slippery skin and tight, green boots that were ruined.

  I hate you and I want to go home.

  I didn’t know. All that time and I... I had no idea. And then I opened the door and there they were...

  I want to go home. And I hate soup. But soup would be fine. If I could just go home.

  What am I going to tell the children?

  It’s beautiful in its box. Gold. Nestled in red velvet.

  Sam, Joe and me running through the field. Tranquelle leaves whipping at my ankles, making the skin itch. Dad says you can rub salt in and it makes the itching go away. My arms are cold.

  Blue lips.

  Rustling green. And one red bauble. Fromemass. My favourite time of year. Long live Frome.

  58 cups. All of them the same colour. And a spoon in one of them. Under the sink.

  Satin lining. What a horrible morning for a funeral. A bright red plastic flower.

  Here comes the bride, all dressed in white...

  Marie’s beautiful face, framed by an orange bob, cut to expose the round earlobes. They peek. Sexy as nipples. Look at them.

  Grandfather’s watch. I can’t bear to wear it, it’s so precious.

  The apple Mum gave me. Green. It looked more like a tennis ball. With a bite out of it. They’re incredibly rare, Mum says. She found it in a bin while she was working at the Glitz. I’ll keep it in the drawer until it rots.

  Tiny shoes. The smallest and most wonderful shoes I have ever seen. Perfect white stitching. For those tiny, unformed feet. Of my unborn son.

  Maggots shuffling like tiny geriatrics, one by one out of my drawer.

  A crust on the earth at the bottom of the lake, and tiny holes made by worms and air.

  The smell of Tranquelle. With a gentle aftertaste of onions.

  The last door of the Fromemass calendar. And when I opened it – no chocolate inside! The kiosk crooks! No space has ever looked so empty.

  Dappled light from the orange firefly drones. On the picnic blanket. Just me and Mum. And Rocket, warming my feet.

  Snow. Everywhere. All over the Tranquelle field. White and purple. The air smells like burning tyres and vanilla. I breathe in. Magic exists. The smell of an enormous barn, in October, filled with rotten Tranquelle stalks. Nothing smells quite like that.

  The itchy, impossible feeling of a cotton blanket on chickenpox. And me. Eight years old. And covered in sickly sweet-smelling lotion. That Lucy calls chamomile lotion. And that we shorten to lotion, because it’s easier. And Lucy isn’t very bright.

  It’s a face I know so well. But it’s not a face I recognise. Sitting on a bench outside the Superloop terminal. It reminds me of the caramel smell of a newborn baby. It’s a face I want to see again. But probably won’t.

  First day on the job. Spilt tea all over my new suit. Hydrophobic. But it still burned. The beep of a machine. Shouting, crackled words half human half telephone line. Forget it. He hangs up. I’m useless.

  Aunt’s patio furniture. And sandwiches. More butter than anything else. Still, they’re free. I’ll be having them. No...no shouldn’t have had them. Fizzing sensation behind the back of the ears. Where vomit comes from.

  Wet. Like a mouthful of someone else’s mouth. What was all the fuss about?

  The driveway. To the party. Longest driveway ever. Is he going to be there? My hair is all wrong. And clutching a packet of Lethene that I got from Lynne in my pocket. Rebellion. Ultimate. I wonder what it will feel like. Mum said it didn’t exist. If Lethene doesn’t exist, then how come I’ve got a whole ten grams of it? Adults are so stupid.

  I’ve never seen the lake look like that before. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the lake until today. The biggest body of water in the state. That’s what we learned at school. And it’s big, but smaller than I imagined. Reflecting clouds. Looks like spilt milk, or worn tin foil. Sea and sky, one bobbing, floating thing. Now I know I get sea sick.

  Bucket. Spade. Castle. Bobby never wants me to have anything nice. I love the lake and I loved my sandcastle. The monstrous foot comes down. I do not love Bobby. Not any more.

  I can’t believe I’m eating anchovies!!!! ... !!!!!...

  Tingling. Like someone tore off my cheek under the cheekbone. What the hell did she slap me for? I didn’t do anything! And I’m forming an idea of what the abstract noun injustice means. Also tingling cheek now wet.

  Empty boards. Grey. Like hundreds of packets of reconstituted dinners. Looks like a vacant stage. Stuffy classroom, and a sweaty teacher desperate to get us to enjoy theatre. Which he’s pronouncing weirdly. And I’m failing the class. But that’s another memory. A hole in the wainscoting. So we had mice then. Well, thank Scientifically Proven God we moved.

  Fingernails. One chewed and
bleeding cuticle.

  I LUV U. X My best and most favourite arrangement of pixels. No one will ever love like I love. Maybe they thought what they had was love. But it wasn’t.

  Parched throat. When we get up this hill.... there had better be a pail of water. Or two. I’m not sharing.

  The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round... and that song goes round and round even though we haven’t had ignition engines or buses since the dark ages. I can’t wait till they automate this job. Every morning. Without fail. For the past thirty years. As if the pod needs direction. Funny. How they’d rather trust me with their children than the technology. Same route every day. The wheels on the bus go round and round...

  I don’t want to share this pastry. Not with another soul. Not with anyone. Oh, mouth-filling, cream spilling between the gap in my teeth, glorious, pastry bliss. Shame it’s so expensive. Frome dollars are hard to come by.

  There’s only one left. Only one. One. One. One. One. One. Zero for a second. One.

  Lost. In the middle of the City. In the middle of the night. And the smell of sewers. One in each nostril. Grey as a bunch of keys. Nasty place to live. Sub-Urbs.

  Toes in water. They told me once you can’t put your toes in the same lake twice. Maybe that wasn’t it. But here I am. The sun is shining and I can see the bottom. My feet cast a shadow on the pebbles under the crystal. Two dark spots, ringed with a light line. And some more smaller spots. Toes.

  Squeezing – turning my insides into juice. What did he say? Dead? I don’t understand what that word means. Not in the same sentence as David. I don’t...squeezing. Sharp. Painful. I’m falling down a well. This is the General Hospital. People aren’t supposed to die here! Do something!!!