You must protect my interests,
Anaxagoras,
Work towards the failure
Of these colleagues who came to this place along with me
Who also left behind delegated factotums like yourself
(Be polite to these men; respect them as your equals;
Effect their elimination if at all you can).

You  must watch the stars,
Anaxagoras,
Maintain the accuracy of the charts I have left you,
Draw our nation’s horoscope
In the blood you will shed with your hands
While my hands are absent.
I am drawing the horoscope of the planet;
I follow the path of the comet,
And I shall be there to see where it shall rest
Or vanish, forever.

Already I have seen,
Anaxagoras,
A senator from that great imperial power stand before the cameras
Issuing stern denials that the phenomenon shall amount to anything.
I have seen a crew of pirates drop anchor,
Lay down their AKs, remove their bandanas,
Wipe sweat from shining foreheads, hands on oiled bloody singlets.
I saw a Coalition sergeant stop and sit on a pockmarked wall
Beside a boy he might have shot as an insurgent;
Both noted the object, wondered what force launched that attack.
I spoke with a nomadic herdsman of the region,
A filthy illiterate who through the translator
Babbled about contact with beings from another world.

The others,
Anaxagoras,
Expect the child to be resident
In the presidential palace
And while I see no harm in consulting the Coalition’s petty, puppet dictator
(What can he do? Really, what can he do?)
I wonder, privately, if the child will not be poor
Since there are so many more of them to be picked.
I dreamed last night of a hovel-dwelling teenager
In filthy blue donated sweats, her
Round dark accusing eyes watching me, taking it in as
I knelt in my charcoal grey suit, in my silk tie
That alone cost more than the seamed leathery husband will ever earn,
Knelt before the child whose face in my dream I could not see,
And to whom I offered what I will offer soon:
A Krugerrand,
A box of incense,
A jar of aromatic ointment used for embalming the dead.

Explanation i

— Some people, I say, go when they have to and whoosh, they’re out of your life. But you’ve got that connection, right. So when you catch up again a few years later, you just pick up like right where you left off. I pause. You ever had that?

— Yeah, she says. Couple of people. We both stop, watch the people pass by outside the café window. So Dennis, she says. One of those people?

— We’ve met up maybe three times since uni. And each time… Memories. You know?

She nods.

— Do I know him?

— Dunno. He might’ve been before your time. Although. Were you at Annie’s wedding?

— Mm-hmm.

— He was there. Pretty much conquered the karaoke. Little guy. Really deep voice.

— Oh! Yeah! With the hair, right? She mimes a white man’s afro with her hands, a big round motion.

— That’s him. Guy with the hair. I smile, nod, sip coffee.

— How long’s he down for?

— Couple days.

— Lovely.

1

The mobile sounds. I pick up.

— Hi.

…Yeah, I’m at the station.

…About ten minutes, I expect. How you doing?

…That’s good. Danny? I can hear him. What’s he up to?

…Aww, no way! I’m kind of gutted I missed that.

…Yeah, I know, but it’s not the same. Can you put him—?

…Hello, Danny! Mummy says you had a really exciting day today. What did you see?

…Oh, wow. That’s really great. And what else did you do?

…Really? And did the dog say hello back?

…Oh, that’s great.

…OK. Daddy loves you, Danny. Bye, bye.

…Ha. Yeah, I’m fine. Yeah. Already done.

…I know. Listen. I’m missing you.

— Yeah, I haven’t seen him yet. Bugger. It’s raining.

…No, I’m at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, yeah. This is him all over. He always does this thing, right, where he comes up with these crazy convoluted travel plans, and it’s to save money or time or it’s like for some reason that makes rational sense to no earthly agency apart from Dennis.

…Mm-hmm. So it turns out that his train is coming in at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, but then it’s not you travelling, is it? He’s got this intricate and closely-timed journey that’s added something like three changes and ninety minutes to his travel time, booked two weeks in advance, and it’s saved him seventy-five quid.

…Seventy-five quid. Who am I to argue? It’s just that it stops at Llansamlet and not in town.

…I know. But he’s a mate.

…Yeah. I think it’s going to arrive. Listen. Send my love to your mum and dad.

…Oh, I think I can manage that.

…Love you. Talk to you tomorrow, I expect.

…Yeah. Love you. Bye.

2

I press the hang-up button, look at the phone for a minute as if anyone’s texted me, out of a sort of reflex action. Dennis doesn’t own a mobile.

Here’s the rumble of a train; automated voices, Welsh and English, man and woman, confirming that this is indeed the train that Dennis will arrive on.

It’s a little two-carriage affair. Hardly anyone is on it, and only two people get off, the first a thirtysomething woman in a business suit, good-looking enough that I feel guilty for looking at her and watching her until she has gone from the platform, and I do not see the figure in front of me, who says, in a familiar bass baritone:

— Hello.

I jump; I do not recognise him. He is shorter than I remember. He wears a plain black scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. Under his battered leather jacket, he wears a wash-worn grey hoodie, and the hood is pulled up over his head. It’s dark now. I have been here a long time.

— Hello, he says again. His voice is always as it was, a baritone, but the kind that comes from the back of the mouth rather than the chest, which always gave the voice a kind of quiet, halting quality, emphasised by the habit he had of swallowing sometimes in mid-sentence.

— Dennis! How are you, man? I put out a hand. He pauses, looks at it, shakes. His hand is very bony, very hard and very cold.

— I’m well. Thank you.

I reach for the larger of his two bags.

— Good journey?

— Fine.

— Shall we—? I wave a hand towards the car.

— Actually, he says, would you mind if we wait here for a minute? There’s something I’d like to see.

— Um, OK. I put the holdall down on the bench, put one hand on the back of my neck, look along the rail tracks. Dennis looks at a digital watch with a threadbare strap.

— It will only be a couple of minutes.

I sit on the bench next to the holdall. He joins me, on the other side of the bag. His footfalls are small and closely paced. He was always a little stiff, but I can see now that he has a small but definite hunch on his back.

The automated voice (Welsh and English, man and woman) says that the next train shall not be stopping here. Dennis stands, takes a couple of paces across the platform.

The train is a full-length Cross-Country. It whizzes past at full speed. In the split-second I see it, it looks like it’s lit dimly red inside, like the people are all standing and in shadow. I see for the briefest moment a man, face pressed against the window, looking like he’s shouting, and a split-second later something that gives the illusion of being large and winged. I’m tired. It’s dark.

— We can go now, says Dennis.

We head to the car.

3

— Oh, no, he says. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. It’s OK?

I am driving.

— Uh, yeah. Yeah. Completely.

— You hadn’t gone to too much trouble?

— No. No. Not at all. I have cleaned the spare room from top to bottom. I have filled the fridge and freezer with vegan food. No. it’s cool.

We stop at a set of lights. I look across at him, wonder what is up with the scarf. Maybe it’s an affectation. He’s done that before, like when he went around wearing a set of NHS glasses without any glass in them. He is looking out of the passenger side window; he turns and looks at me. In the dark, he is only lit by the red light, and I cannot see his eyes. I give him a tight-lipped smile; the light changes. I return my eyes to the road, set off.

— So whose place is it you’re staying at?

— Joe and Sarah’s. I don’t think you know them.

— No. It doesn’t ring a bell.

— They’re not around anyway. I’m just house-sitting.

— Oh.

— It’s a good base. It means I can catch up with some other people who I was wanting to see.

— Oh yeah? Who’s that, then?

— People. You don’t know them. Maybe you’ll meet them on Sunday.

— OK.

I drop him off at the house, one of the really big, nice places at the West Cross end of the Mumbles Road, with the really long drive and maybe six bedrooms. I would have known about someone who lived here. Wouldn’t I?

He has a key.

I help him carry his bags in, look around the hall. It’s beautiful. No pictures, anywhere. But lovely. Except that the cupboard door under the stair has a broken panel, the lower right-hand side one, like someone bashed a hole in it from inside with a really big hammer or something.

— Hey, I say. What happened there?

— No idea, says Dennis. He shuffles towards the kitchen. Tea?

— Yeah.

He watches me drink it. He doesn’t have any of his own. I head back to mine. I watch TV.

4

I decided to walk. I am in no hurry, and it already a beautiful morning. The traffic on the main road, on the other side of that wide grass verge, seems very far away. Hardly anyone else is on the esplanade, and by the time I get as far as Blackpill Lido, no one is there at all.

The beach on Swansea Bay is very wide and very flat. The tide comes in and out a mile or more in minutes, and it comes in while I walk, the sea lapping against the wall on which the south side of the path sits, that keeps Swansea from the ocean. A band of light, like a path to somewhere else again, stretches across the sea from me to the still-low sun, and follows me, and I imagine hopping over the crumbling path and walking along the path, and vanishing into the light. And I would be the last to go, because everyone else has gone.

5

At the top of the drive, in front of that big white West Cross house, there’s Dennis, first person I’ve seen today, sitting on the path next to the flower bed, hands clasped over his knees, staring at the flower bed. He’s still wearing the kerchief. I stand next to him, look down, and I am a little shocked at how grey his tight brown curls have gone.

— Hey. What are you looking at?

He points at the earth. His finger is longer than I remember it being, the nail long and filthy, like a storybook witch. He is pointing a mass of something pinkish under and around the daffodils, a lump of something like flesh that seems to twist and fold in on itself as I watch. It takes me a moment to figure out what it is I am looking at.

— That’s an awful lot of worms, I say.

— Mm.

— What do you think they’re doing?

He doesn’t reply immediately. A movement behind his kerchief reminds me of how Dennis used to lick his lips before saying something, and how you knew how he was choosing his words.

— Did you know that there are a million earthworms for every human being on the planet?

— No. No, Dennis. I did not.

— When we’re gone, they’ll take over. They’ll replace us.

— Wasn’t that supposed to be the cockroaches?

— No. He is in earnest, as he always was, serious or joking. No, the earthworms. Definitely the earthworms.

— Oh.

I put a hand in my hair, tongue in cheek, look down the path at the silent main road. I let a breath out, lower lip pushed out.

— Listen, I say. Wanna do the charity shop thing?

Explanation ii

— So when’s he coming?

— Friday. Through to Monday morning.

— And you’re going to watch TV and visit charity shops. She sips her coffee, faintly amused.

I laugh.

— It’s like a tradition. The Great Charity Shop Crawl. Dennis, right, he’s massively into science fiction. And he’s a big reader. And he’s a completist. And he’s poor. And you know what that makes?

— No.

— It makes a man whose obsessions are hampered by a perennial lack of funds. He can’t just go to Borders or Amazon to find the stuff he’s after. Besides, most of the stuff he collects is rare or completely out of print. So he like developed this terrifying ability to learn by heart the exact location of every single charity shop and second-hand bookshop that exists in like the whole country.

She raises an eyebrow.

— And you have too?

— It’s like he’d visit, and swear to God he’d spend a whole day, maybe two and we’d scour every junk shop in the city, like the whole city, and he’d be like looking for the middle book in a set of juvenile sci-fi paperbacks from the sixties or seventies and he wouldn’t have started reading them until he had the whole set, and he’d've have had some of these books for years. Years. Or this one specific Fighting Fantasy book. Do you remember those?

— No.

— They’re like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, only with dice.

— I haven’t heard of those either.

— You’re hopeless. Anyway, he used to find stuff for me that he knew I wanted. So I get a whole run of the Valkyrie Luther Arkwrights and like the illustrated hardback version of Elric at the End of Time. Or some old Judge Dredd books he knew I didn’t have.

— None of this means anything to me.

— And I’d help him out. Music with me. So I’d make him mix tapes and send him vinyl and CDs I’d found in Rowlands and the fairs. So he got all the Syd Barrett and the Viv Stanshall and some Half Man Half Biscuit.

— Still, she says, miming her hand going over her head, whoosh.

I sigh.

— Look, the point is that our relationship was largely founded on sharing this stuff. Like we were the Great British pop culture archaeologists. Amicus horror movies and Robyn Hitchcock on vinyl and dog-eared copies of Warrior and Misty.

— Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?

— Well, yeah. A bit. I mean, it’s a young man’s pursuit. Not every young man’s pursuit. A certain sort of young man. But it was a long time ago. And we were young men.

— So it’s nostalgia.

— Yeah. It’s been years.

And this is what I don’t say: that it won’t be long before no one’s ever going to call me young again. And that it’s a very long time since I was that sort of young man, and that I am a little frightened that I have forgotten what it is like.

6

We have by this point ranged across Mumbles, West Cross and up as far as Derwen Fawr and Clyne, a circle of several miles, and we have visited shops I have never heard of, tucked away in streets I barely knew existed. The main roads are exceptionally quiet today. At times it seems like I haven’t seen a single car or pedestrian, but I know for a fact I must have seen someone.

Now the side roads; I can accept that no one is there. They are dead.

The shops represent charities I have not heard of, names painted on faded board. Indigent Support. British Asylum Builders. International Euthanasia Guild. Feed the Wretched.

Every shop, if it appears to have anyone inside it at all, contains as its presiding spirit a single grim-faced old biddy, sitting behind a counter cluttered with porcelain knick-knacks and cheap discoloured cuddly toys, in a grotto walled with unwanted ornamental jugs and out-of-fashion clothes and jigsaw puzzles depicting seaside scenes from the other end of the country. Each time, the old woman smiles briefly at Dennis with his kerchief and shuffling gait, as he heads for the books, but fixes me with an eye like a chipped glass marble, and does not look away until I have left the shop.

The smell of age hangs in my nostrils. I shift my feet. My neck itches.

By about third or maybe the fourth of these shops I start imagining things. Behind neatly folded chintz curtains and plastic baby-walkers and racks of those little old lady hats that I cannot imagine anyone makes any more, here is a foetus in formaldehyde. An electric lamp with brown twisted flex and a once-white 13 amp plug made from someone’s skull. A curved, brown knife, with the label in wobbly handwriting, Sacrificial knife, 75p.

In this last shop, a cardboard box on a chair sitting just outside the door has a sign made from one panel of a very old cornflakes packet, on which is written FREE. Donations gratefully received within. Dennis is already squatting by the bottom shelves, head cocked to one side, reading every spine, one by one, occasionally taking a book out, flipping through it, putting it back.

I’ll wait out here, I think. Absently, I pick up a fat, tatty paperback with plain white covers, turned yellow at the spine, with the sour, decrepit smell of old cigarette smoke hanging from the paper. It falls open in my hands. I read a couple of paragraphs in which the writer discusses the best way to degrade and murder a child. I close it, without looking at the title, and put it back between The Da Vinci Code and some Jilly Cooper novel. I look up, see the old woman smirking through the window. Her shoulders rock gently. She is laughing at me for taking offence.

I decide to stay outside in the sun. I sit on the front garden wall of the boarded-up house next door and wait. It is beautiful today. Red-brown leaves litter this street. The sun is bright and the wind is low. It is a golden, melancholy Autumn day like the ones in which years ago I used to take solace in a comfortable kind of loneliness, or in friends like Dennis and the collections we shared, whiling away the time until I was no longer single, no longer without children.

I cannot hear traffic anywhere.

As Dennis comes out of the shop, he slips something whitish and I think evil-looking into his jute shopping bag. He sits on the wall next to me. It surprises me a little how small he is. How his feet dangle next to the ground.

— Find what you were after? I say.

— Some things.

I run a hand through my hair, let out one of those sighs that sometimes used to serve when I was younger as a conversational gambit, when I was uncomfortable with nothing being said. The breeze turns cold.

— You know, I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mumbles so dead. We’ve barely seen a soul.

Dennis grunts. It’s an odd, wet noise, as if made around the base of the tongue and rolled around before coming out. His kerchief moves a little. I put my hands on my knees, turn to look at him. It is late in the afternoon and the sun is in my eyes. I cannot clearly see his face.

— Dennis, I say. I have to ask.

He makes a throat-clearing sound.

— Hmm?

— You know your — I wave my fingers around in front of my mouth — I was wondering why you were wearing it. I mean, it’s not like the glasses. Is it?

— No. It’s not like the glasses.

— OK. So, can I ask — ?

— Do you remember, he says, where you were twenty-three, perhaps, and you said…you said you felt how if you were in trouble… or felt trapped. That you did not have to stay. Anywhere. That there would always be a way out? You remember.

— I remember. It was a long time ago. I don’t —

— You were wrong.

He is looking away from me, toward the sun. He is unsteady in his posture, swaying, not solid. For a moment, against my will, I imagine that he is not my old friend, but that he is a double made from hundreds of worms, and that I could poke him and he will disintegrate into a wave of worms that would wriggle and slither away from an emptying heap of clothes.

— I was young, I say. You say things like that when you’re young. Because you have to. Because when you’re that age you think you’re invincible. And you wouldn’t achieve anything if you didn’t.

He clears his throat again. As has always been Dennis’ way.

I stand.

— Where to next? I say.

Dennis hops down, smooths his hands on his cords as if they are wet or dirty. He gestures up the hill.

— One more. It’s just around the corner.

7

— So, I say, are they on holiday or something?

We are standing in the hall of the big West Cross house and I am hanging up my jacket on a brass wall hook.

— Something like that, says Dennis.

I got a bag of chips at Dick Barton’s. Dennis said he wasn’t hungry. He never ate much, I tell myself. He sorts me out with a plate and fork, and watches me.

But I admit to myself a faint disappointment that I shall not see him eat.

I’ll walk home, I say. I should start soon, I say. Maybe I’ll be in time for the last bus, I say. Tomorrow, I say?

— Not in the daytime, he replies. I promised a few people I’d catch up with them.

— But in the evening. Film and Who?

— I would like that.

— Tomorrow night, then. Maybe, I say, giving in to my curiosity, you can get your mysterious mates along.

— Maybe.

8

A bus pulls up at the stop before the roundabout. The 3A, my bus. Its doors open and the driver turns his head towards me.

He looks like he’s made of earthworms, thousands of them all knotted together, writhing, imperfectly forming and reforming eyes and lips as worms wriggle away into the mass and new ones take their places. Overflowing from and wriggling back into a filthy FirstBus Cymru uniform. No one else is on the bus.

I step back, as you do; the uniform shrugs and shudders. A pulpy hand presses the button, closes the door. The bus moves on. I shake my head. I’m tired. It’s dark.

I shall walk home.

Explanation iii

— So Dennis knows The Prisoner and Blake’s 7 and Space: 1999 all by heart, but his first love has always been Doctor Who. Long before it was everyone else’s.

— That doesn’t surprise me.

— Heh. Yeah. He’s a huge —

— Geek?

— Aficionado.

— Sorry.

— It’s OK. I don’t think he’s as self-conscious about it as I am.

— OK.

— So every time he rocked up, he’d bring a little stack of videos, and it’d be like a classic story I hadn’t seen. And also maybe like a cult film I haven’t heard of. I shift a little in my chair. We’d bond over it.

I give her the look that says, I am soliciting your approval, because you are a friend, and this is what you do.

— I mean, it’s not everyone’s idea of fun, I say.

9

I spend most of Sunday at home. I catch up on my reading. I walk along the seafront as the sun sets.

I don’t see or hear from a living soul all day.

10

On the massive flatscreen television that would consume the wall of any other house, but which looks in place here, Tom Baker runs in that somewhat sedate way 1970s British actors do through a corridor, pursued by marching, black-clad gun-toting aliens in round helmets. My eyes grow heavy. He runs through the TARDIS. He runs through a public swimming baths. I drop off.

I wake up; still in the lounge of that big West Cross house, and the room is dark and the TV is still on, and now Dennis and I have company, six or seven others perched on a footstool, the sofa, the floor. The lights are down. Their faces are in shadow. They’re all watching the TV. It takes me a minute for my eyes to get used to the dark.

Every face is covered, every figure is small and skinny, mostly male as far as I can tell, although one wears a floral dress and black tights, without having any other sign of gender. Every one has his or her face covered, at least in the lower half. A huge Tom Baker woolly scarf, wrapped up round and round over a nose. A hockey mask, or something like a hockey mask, not like the bloke in the horror film, more modern than that. A black bandana, printed with skulls and roses and thorns and 1980s rock band images. Someone sitting on the floor near the door, peering through the gap between the sofa and the armchair in which I am sitting, is wearing a motorcycle helmet.

Here is Dennis, on the other side of the room, sitting on the arm of the big armchair by the bay window. It is hard to see, but I am convinced that he glances at me and sees that I am awake, and nods towards the TV screen. I squint into the dark, trying to make out these people. Did Dennis introduce me to his friends? Was I so tired I don’t even remember?

Someone on the TV screams.

On screen, a corpse, the big reveal. A young son and a teenage daughter have found their father, his face eaten off, one of his arms missing, and they are sick with shock and fear. They hold each other, mouth reassurances, and it becomes apparent, though it is not spelled out, that these words have long ago become unfamiliar to them.

The scene cuts to a woman in her forties. I assume she is their mother. Someone is pursuing her through the run-down, deserted streets and alleys of a provincial British town by a figure or figures half-revealed.

Wait. This is a slasher film. I hate slasher films. Dennis knows I hate slasher films.

The shadowed pursuer is short, and wiry. A shot of a hand pressed against a wall shows long, filthy fingernails, bony knuckles. Another shot, a split-second, in close-up, depicts a long tongue running over wide, stained teeth.

The woman collapses at a corner. Her back is against the wall of an end terrace house. She looks over her shoulder, around the corner, up the street, listening for footsteps, her breath irregular, made in little yelps and gasps. The shot pans back. Behind her, from the alley, three stiff, hunched silhouettes approach under a streetlamp. She turns, sees them, tries to get to her feet, to run, trips, falls on her face, tries to crawl. Cut to her face and shoulders; something is pulling her backwards. She clutches at a lamp post. She screams. Blood from out of shot spatters the pavement around her. She stops screaming. Her eyes roll back into her head and she goes limp, falls on her face. Cut to a shot from above. The bottom half of her body is almost completely gone, a few bloody bones from the waist down.

Cut to the boy and the girl. They are in the kitchen, and they are arguing again. They do not know what to do. The girl is begging her brother to take a carving knife; he is near-hysterical. The boy runs to the lounge, tries to curl up behind the sofa. The girl chases him, sits on the floor beside him. She tries to calm him down, stops shouting, holds the boy tight, tells him, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, that she loves him, that everything will be all right.

The lights go out.

The girl holds her brother tight, and then slowly, they get up. She takes her brother’s hand, and tells him to be quiet. They advance to back of the house. They keep to the wall. The girl holds the knife out in front of her. They get to the back door. It is locked. The key is just there, across the kitchen. She puts her finger to her lips and smiles, and leaves the boy at the back door as she crosses the kitchen, walking around the wall of the room. She puts out her hand to get the key from its hook.

Something stiff and strangely apelike reaches down from above the cooker and grabs her, lifts her kicking and screaming from the floor and up out of shot. Cut to a close-up of the knife dropping to the kitchen floor and clattering, and drops of blood, first one or two and then great splatters, falling on it. The screams continue. The boy snaps and runs past the falling blood, back into the house, dives into the cupboard under the stairs, closes the door, curls into a ball.

Cut to his face, streaked with tears. He tries his absolute best to collect himself, not altogether successfully, and it is then we see something terrible dawn upon him. He is not breathing raggedly; the sound of panting continues. The camera pans up from his face. Behind him and above him we see a grinning maw, full of those broad stained, uneven teeth. They part. A long pointed tongue licks around a huge lipless mouth.

Cut again: a simple view of the cupboard door under the stairs, central on screen. The handle moves once, twice. Something inside bangs against the door. A brief scream, muffled. The lower right-hand panel of the door buckles suddenly from the inside with a single loud crack, like it had a smart impact from a sledgehammer, or if someone kicked it really, really hard. Then silence.

The credits roll over the shot of the door.

And I think, wait. The small smothered figures around me watch intently, silently as the names of actors I have never heard of roll up the screen and it fades to black. They have all moved slightly closer to the screen. I am no longer sure which one is Dennis. My eyes are so, so heavy. I am warm. I am not, I register with sleepy surprise, frightened. I nod off.

11

It is full morning and I am lying on the sofa with a crick in my neck. The plush upholstery is damp under my face, where I have drooled on it. Someone has draped a blanket over me.

The bay window faces south and slightly east, and although the curtains are closed, the room is filled with soft golden light. Dennis is sitting on the arm of the chair nearest the bay window. By the time I have seen him, he has turned away. He stands, steps to the side of the bay, pulls the cord. The curtains open with a sort of hiss.

Bright sunlight fills the room. Dennis approaches. I sit up, hand on the back of my neck, the thumb and index finger of my other hand on my eyelids. I put my hands on my knees, blink, squint into the light. Dennis stands almost in silhouette in front of me.

— Sleep well? he says.

I make a non-committal sort of noise. My eyes get used to the light. Dennis is not wearing his kerchief.

The lower half of Dennis’ face is wholly taken up by his grinning moon-on-its-side mouth, vast and wide, chipped teeth like piss-streaked gravestones. The gums are bordered by choppy scar tissue as if someone cut the lips off with a Stanley knife to make room for the mouth. A slightly raised area of reddish flesh, dotted with blackheads, sits where a nose should be. His eyes are perfectly round, sit under heavy, low brows, and are indeterminate in number: one, two, more, I can’t tell.

And Dennis’ voice.

— Cup of tea?

I screw up my eyes again, try to squeeze the picture out of my head, open them, look straight at him. Teeth. Eyes. Ruined flesh.

— Yes. That would be nice.

So we head to the kitchen, past the cupboard door with the wrecked panel, and we sit at the kitchen table, me and the old friend with the charnel mouth, and he makes me a cup of Earl Grey, and I am stiff and shivering and I am breathing irregularly with little yelps like I’m about to hyperventilate, or already am hyperventilating, only I haven’t realised that I am yet. He watches as my hands shake and I fight to raise the mug to my lips and drink, and I think I spill some, and Dennis show no sign that he has noticed. He watches with no drink of his own, hands clasped on the table, grinning, grinning, grinning.

And he says to me, after a time,

— It’s been really good to see you, Simon.

I put the mug down.

— Yeah. Thanks.

— I thought of you often.

— Yeah. I did, too. I realise that this is true.

— I used to count you as one of the best friends I had ever had. He sounds terribly sad. He grins. I was so glad when we caught up. It’s been great catching up. It has.

I nod. He clears his throat.

— It means a lot that you would come to visit me, he says.

And this makes no more sense than the face, but I know I should reply with yes, great, let’s do it again sometime, but I cannot, and it dawns on me that perhaps Dennis knows full well that I cannot, and that he approves of my honesty.

— You’re still one of my oldest and best friends. I hope you know that, he says.

I am facing the hall. I can see the door to the cupboard under the stairs.

— I think I do, I say. We have history, don’t we?

12

I shake his hand, which is cold and hard and lumpy and which has appallingly long nails. I do not offer to accompany him back to the train station, because I think I would be unable to keep from guessing what train he will take, and where it will go, and I don’t think that I could cope with that.

So we say goodbye, and although it has begun to drizzle, I ignore the bus stop, and I cross the still-silent Mumbles Road by the West Cross Inn, and walk along the esplanade and watch the tide come in and grow whiter and angrier. By the time I rejoin the main road a good hour later, I have to press the button on the Pelican crossing at the bottom of Brynmill Lane and wait for the green man because the road is too busy to cross without waiting.

And I walk up the hill, passing the usual traffic of young mums and hungover students and pensioners, and the seagulls and swans are in fine voice across the lake at Brynmill Park, angry and hungry and declaring they are alive, they are alive.

And I unlock the door, and pick up a letter for my wife from the bank and a Jiffy bag containing a Scott Walker CD I won off of eBay last week. And I sit in my lounge and let the cat come and sit by me, and I absent-mindedly stroke him, and I wonder what I am going to tell my wife, when she brings my young son home and asks me, how was your weekend?

Snails don’t think much, on the whole.

Ooh, lettuce, thinks one, making for the vegetable patch. Could do with a bit of rain, thinks another, probing around on the dry stone path. Please don’t eat me, bird, thinks a third, as his antennae withdraw into his head and his head into his shell.

This one thinks, Damn, that’s it, then, as a footprint shadow obscures the light and everything goes darker. The snail shrinks back into his shell, waiting for the end. But the foot stops; hovers for a moment, moves to one side before setting down on the ground.

And pwic suddenly, the snail is plucked off the ground, leaving behind a frightened little smear of slime. And then it stops. The snail puts out an edge of its stomach-foot, and feels a reassuring green leaf. An antenna pops out, followed by the other. A voice, a big shape in different colours, and the taste of greenery.

The snail, of course, forgets what happens.

But he is not the only one watching.

2. She has a halo of sorts

— Today, thinks Rebecca, it will be All Right. I have a little bit of good karma.

She stops for a moment and looks at the iridescent slime that coats the snail’s body, the way the snail doesn’t so much move as flow, at the ridgy spiral of its shell, so solid and so fragile. She likes the way its little feelers move around. She’d almost think it was happy.

She finds the sight of a snail munching on the leaf of some weed inexplicably cheering.

— It’s the little things that keep you going, she says out loud to no one in particular. And she hoists her bag over her shoulder, and heads for the bus stop.

Thursdays aren’t normally a good day. But: Rebecca arrives in time for the bus and she gets a seat; she arrives at the Post in plenty of time; she manages to avoid the eye of the editor; the stories are, on the whole, interesting and not in need of terribly difficult amounts of subbing. And if no one in the office talks to her much, and no one remembers to invite her to the staff lunch, and no one pays any attention to the way that this morning, unbeknownst to her, her hair seems to have caught the spring sunlight and held on to it like some sort of halo, well, she doesn’t seem to mind.

You might almost think her blessed by some higher power.

3. Same time, same place

Friday, Rebecca, walking to work, sees a snail in the same place. She looks around, and satisfied that no one is watching, crouches, and says,

— Hello. Are you the snail I met yesterday?

The snail seems to stop eating, and its antennae almost seem to wave in her direction.

— You are, aren’t you? She pats her hair. Well, I had a nice day yesterday. I hope you have one too.

Rebecca is about to say something else, but someone walks past her, unexpectedly, and Rebecca blushes, and straightens her bag strap and pretends to be looking for something she dropped.

— See you, she whispers.

4. She dreams of snails

At dinner this evening, when Rebecca’s husband, Rob, asks her how her day was, she smiles, and says it was the absolute best it could have been, under the circumstances.

— I suppose that I’m in with the God of Snails, she says, tucking into her conchiglie bolognese (she cooked the pasta shaped like shells rather than the twisty stuff out of some sort of reflex action. It just seemed right).

Rob smiles; Rebecca has a talent for whimsy.

That night, she dreams of snails.

5. Superstitions and religions

The web of coincidences and happenstance defines us. We link all this stuff that happens in our heads, and imagine some sort of causal relationship. Superstitions come from this sort of thing, and sometimes religions.

For Rebecca, it’s something of a whimsical in-joke shared with her friends, a thing to laugh about, no more than that. She’s nice to the snails that live in her garden and on her street, and she has a good day. She doesn’t see a snail, or fails to say hello, and she gets shouted at by her boss or has to sub-edit stories about marrow-growing competitions in one of the other local papers.

Rebecca imagines the King of All Snails smiling down on her; in her head she pictures a benevolent Buddha-like figure with iridescent, bumpy skin, antennae and a huge shell on his back, sitting on a throne and sending good things down to her.

And now Rebecca has a baby coming, and her husband is solicitous and swells with pride, and she feels full of life and love, and slight misgivings about no longer being able to fit in any of her clothes.

Months pass. Rebecca says hello to the snails, and avoids stepping on them, and picks them up and puts them on luscious green leaves, and imagines them waving their little antennae in thanks. And life is sweet.

She sees a lot of snails these days, in her overgrown little back garden, in the street outside her house. It’s just a coincidence.

6. Pilgrims

Mondays, Rebecca doesn’t have to go to work. Her usual routine: she gets up late and does her hair, writes a couple of articles for her newspaper, and maybe meets a friend in the afternoon for a cup of tea. It’s all pretty civilised.

She’s not feeling so great this morning. The Bump is playing up a little. She woke up at six today, and never really got back to sleep. Still, she lies in bed and grunts a half-asleep goodbye as Rob heads out to work, and dozes in fits and starts until nearly ten.

The milk she pours on her Fruit’n’Fibre is on the turn, and she manages a mouthful before deciding that breakfast is not for her (she puts a hand on the Bump and whispers, Sorry). The rest of her breakfast goes in the composter, except that it’s full, so Rebecca has to find her slippers and dressing gown and go outside to empty it into the compost bin in the garden. And it’s raining.

Still, it has to be done. So she takes a deep breath and opens the kitchen door, to find hundreds of snails waiting patiently in columns and rows at her front door.

They regard her, standing there in her dressing gown and slippers, with no makeup, and messier-than-usual hair. Holding a green plastic composter. And Rebecca gets the strangest feeling, like there’s some great occasion, and she is terribly underdressed, like she feels in that recurring dream where she’s back at school and about to do exams, only she’s in her underwear.

The snails don’t seem to be particularly bothered. The front row extend their antennae towards her, and then shrink them back, bow their heads almost into their shells, and then, at their accustomed pace, turn and move to one side. The second row take their cue and move forward, and the rows behind them each take the place of the one in front.

Rebecca stares at this balletic manoeuvre for a whole ten minutes before clearing her throat.

— I’m terribly sorry, she says to the snails. Would you mind waiting for a while?

And she closes the door and steps inside.

— Right, she says.

She showers, dresses, puts on some lipstick and brushes her hair. As she’s leaving her bedroom, she hears a knock at the front door. The postman has brought her a small, awkwardly-shaped package.

She thanks the postie, and inside, opens the cube-shaped package. A box of the kind that might contain a ring. Except, flipping it open, she finds a gold chain and a large, heavy jewelled pendant, fashioned in some fabulously baroque and archaic way to resemble a snail’s shell. It must be someone else’s. No, that’s her name on the brown paper, written in what looks like old-fashioned fountain pen ink.

She holds the necklace in her hand, taking note of its weight, and wondering where it came from. No card or note came in the package. It seems somehow appropriate to put it on, however, and wearing her new acquisition she returns to the back door to find the snails waiting patiently for her.

— You’re going to stay here until you’re done, aren’t you? She says to the snails.

And so, she receives her visitors, row by row, as they show respect in the way that only snails can.

After an hour of this, Rebecca has to go — apologetically — and get a chair, because her back is killing her. But she comes back.

Rebecca doesn’t get bored. Long into the afternoon, she takes pleasure in the adulation of these creatures, taking note of the unique ways each one moves, the variations in swirls and colours on a snail’s shell.

She doesn’t tell anyone about it. Not the friend she talks with that afternoon, not Rob, not her mum who calls for a chat and a lecture about what she’s got coming when the baby comes. Not because they won’t believe her, although they won’t.

But because this is her time, her special time. It’s her secret.

7. She counts snails

She finds it hard to sleep; as Rob lies beside her on his back, breathing gently, she stares into the dark. And she does not sleep. She closes her eyes and sees the snails, and pictures the snail-pendant that sits hidden in her shoulder-bag.

She’s at the cusp of something. Something must begin soon.

She decides that if she’s going to picture snails, she might as well do something about it. So she counts them. Like you’d count sheep. Only more slowly.

And she drifts away to sleep…

And wakes, she’s wide awake, aware of an odd lettuce-green light that bathes the room, shining through the front window of her house.

She sits up, rubbing her back, expecting the light to fade, half-believing it to be some visual left-over from sleep. But it’s bright and real, and so she looks out of the window, and nothing is there.

She says out loud, That’s odd.

She sits down on the side of the bed and looks at the window. And then she sees the King of All Snails, fat and shiny and smiling, sitting on the windowsill, a snail-trail leading up the window, out through the gap where it’s open, down the other side and presumably down the wall to the street. He’s about a foot-and-a-half in height.

Rebecca opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again, closes it, runs her hand through her hair, and says,

— I thought you’d be a bit bigger.

— Oh, I’m big enough. The King of All Snails shrugs and extends his eye-stalks. Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?

— Um. It had crossed my mind. But I thought it would be a bit rude to ask.

— Quite so. The King of All Snails beams and settles somewhat, his mushy snail-flesh bulk rippling under his white robe.

— Should I be standing?

— No, no. If anything, I should be showing respect for you.

— How so?

— I love you.

Rebecca doesn’t know where to put herself. She reaches around with her right hand, as if trying to locate something like a pen or a lipstick with which she can fiddle.

— Oh. I- I mean, that’s lovely. But —

— No, no. I’m a snail. That sort of thing is out of the question. Besides, we don’t do it like —

She cuts him short.

— What is it like, then?

— I love you because you are extravagantly kind and generous to even the lowest of us, and because you are bright and funny and because you do not take yourself seriously. I love you because you are beautiful, because you are aware of how that life inside you reflects that beauty and extends it to more than one human life. He warms to his subject, extends pudgy snail-flesh hands in an attitude of blessing. I love you, he says, because you are my friend.

Rebecca doesn’t know what to say.

— I don’t know what to say, she says.

— Be my priestess.

— Sorry?

— My priestess.

The King of All Snails explains that the last of his priesthood died out a long time ago. He is unloved, and unremarked. When small gods need a friend, he says, what they really want is a little bit of worship.

In some stories, this would take on a sinister bent; perhaps the King of All Snails would ask for human sacrifice, or perhaps slowly, he would insidiously turn Rebecca into a snail, or perhaps he would infest the region with carnivorous gastropods. This is not one of those stories.

And Rebecca, feeling that she knows this in the way that you know things when you are having a dream, is about to accept when something occurs to her.

— But I made you up, she says.

— Maybe. He shrugs his eyestalks, which shorten somewhat. So how about it?

— Well, I have this contract at work which, erm, cracks down on moonlighting. You know But I’m going on maternity soon. And they don’t have to know. And I don’t think I really want to go back after Bump is born… She bites her lip. Oh, go on, then.

The King of All Snails expands and the lettuce-green glow intensifies.

— You won’t regret it. Thank you. I’ll let you get on. He gives a malleable flourish, and turns, flowing up the window and down the other side. Rebecca watches him go.

She doesn’t go back to sleep.

8. Lettuce leaf sacrifice

Dreams usually depend on going back to sleep, or waking up, don’t they?

Rebecca reminds herself of that, even as she regrets giving up caffeine. She just about manages the hoovering, and is dozing in an armchair when the postman thumps the door again, asks her to sign for a sizeable package.

In a box covered with silvery spiral designs, Rebecca finds a lovely green silk robe, with the same spirals embroidered all over it in gold, and a headdress made of gold, designed to look like snail antennae. And a little instruction book, bound in lovely hand-made paper, painted in thousands of little spiral swirls.

Which is why, when no one is looking, she wears her priestly (priest-ess-ly?) regalia and with great ceremony, sacrifices a lettuce leaf in her back garden, and will do nearly every day until her baby is born, happy and healthy, and ready to receive every bit of love she has.

The snails won’t mind one bit. Snails don’t think much, on the whole.

“Doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases… appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest… is literature?” — Roland Barthes

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards, OK? What I was asking in that scene is: what if politicians continue to pay doctors peanuts? Could they literally turn into monkeys? And no one’s asked that before.” — Garth Marenghi

So.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day about books and writing and stuff and I made the confession that I am not actually one for genre fiction these days, and he says, yeah, but, and he starts telling me apropos of very little that he’s been reading this really excellent series of detective novels — I honestly couldn’t tell you a title or an author. But he says that they’re good writing, and I say OK, what are they about? And he says something like, they’re about this detective and she’s disabled and in a wheelchair, right, and she solves crimes. And I say cool, but what are they about? And he’s like, what?

See, the problem I have with an awful lot of genre fiction is that isn’t actually about an awful lot except its plot and premise (which in science fiction and fantasy is expressed in a central “what if”). And by “about” I mean about something present, current, human, something true. Granted, also, a lot of it is because most genre fiction on the market is written in vast quantities by people who think any idiot can write and consider the license more valuable actually learning to, you know, write, but that’s another essay. Or possibly a rant.

Let’s assume we’re talking about that minority of genre writers who can actually write and who are aiming at doing something a bit more serious, a bit more crafted. OK?

This is part of the reason why many mainstream critics and intelligent readers dismiss sci-fi and fantasy at the end of the day, even the heavyweight stuff. It’s part of the reason why literary writers like Margaret Atwood have often tried to deny that their novels should have the “S” word and the “F” word attached to them . There’s this very real, very powerful and not altogether unfounded fear that a book labelled as science fiction is somehow disqualified from literature.

It’s a really big part of the reason why more people take Jane Austen — for example — so much more seriously than any number of genre novelists. But even Austen’s novels happen in a world as alien to the modern reader as anything by, say, Frank Herbert, underneath all those brittle witticisms and long dresses and Regency dances and house visits and astute social commentary about social mores in the Georgian era, is something fundamentally true. Something about the way we sabotage our affections, find ways to hide behind artificial constructs, and embarrassment and pride (and hell, prejudice too) rather than grasp hold of things that should be far more precious to us. You never went to a Regency party. You never lived in a country house. It doesn’t matter. It’s true. You never lived in a country house. It doesn’t matter. It’s true.

But a lot of genre fiction isn’t about that shared human experience. A lot of genre fiction, even genre fiction considered serious and heavyweight — I’m thinking of several living writers here, but let’s not name names — has no subtext, no human core.

I’m talking about the stuff that’s solely about those what-ifs: what if someone learned how to make self-aware robots? What if aliens made contact using a big black rock that made monkeys hit each other with sticks? What if the powers that be decided that the only solution to the population problem was to mince up dissidents and serve them up to the populace as whole as tasty snack foods? What if everybody went blind and in the resulting chaos got preyed upon by giant ambulatory carnivorous plants with whippy tentacles? What if the gorillas got smart and took over?

Which is all well and good, but none of this has that truth in it. Which is not to say that genre fiction can’t have that truth, and when you compare it to the stuff that doesn’t, it’s blindingly obvious.

Avoiding slamming living authors, I’ll turn to television programmes: Heroes, for instance, just doesn’t. Even when it wasn’t shit, it was always devoid of meaningful subtext. It’s a show with no layers, only concerned with the what-if: what if some people develop superpowers? Without any truth to anchor it, it got very stupid very quickly.

On the other hand, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although with a premise that was daft any way you looked at it, got away with it because it was about a woman’s rite of passage into adulthood. It’s interesting that the further it got from its original setting the weaker the show got, actually. Few rites of passage are as potent as the teenage ones.

Or Battlestar Galactica, which got away with the lameness of its what-ifs and garnered mainstream praise because — and it pains me to admit this, because I couldn’t ever get past how pompous and hokey and humourless it was — it actually was about something, about the things we do to each other in the name of ideologies and prejudices and duty. If it hadn’t had that core of shared meaning, that core of truth, it would have ended up as stupid as Heroes did. And actually, that core of truth was what made Battlestar Galactica end up smarter than a show that was just lame and hokey, like Andromeda. Or the original Battlestar Galactica, for that matter.

I don’t have a whole lot of time for Tolkien, either, but let’s face it, I’d be an idiot if I couldn’t see that he represents the experience of the ordinary person when faced with huge events, and the way in which even the smallest of us have something heroic within ourselves. Tolkien’s brand of story has been pastiched a near-infinite number of times, but not really duplicated.

You have to bear in mind that when I talk about truth in subtext, I’m not talking about a slavish adherence to facts here. Truth and Fact are two different things, and although evangelicals, crusading evolutionary biologists and Republicans have trouble getting their heads around this, a story can be true without having a single grain of fact in it. It’s an important point, because having truth is not the same as preaching, or party politics, or morality plays, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

Good subtext does not preach. It shows. It represents.Good subtext does not preach. It shows. It represents. It is not trying to make a point or frame an argument. It’s trying to show you something that you can identify with. A political point isn’t completely worthless — Harper Lee and Dickens and Steinbeck are all proof of that; so are George Orwell, Antony Burgess and HG Wells. But none of these writers descended to simple sermonising (well, maybe Dickens, a bit, but he was paid by the word, so what can you do?) and none of them are about party politics, or political issues that are only tied to their own time. Every one of them speaks to something current, something that will always be current.

War of the Worlds is a classic example, actually. I mean, yes, it has an alien invasion as its central plot-moving event, but really it’s about the behaviour of people and societies when faced with events bigger and more frightening than they can understand. I read it around September-October 2001, actually, and remember how accurately Wells’ account modelled the headlong descent of the West into the madness of the War on Terror.

Or Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, whose futuristic youth culture seems ridiculously quaint now, but whose narrative shows what it’s like to grow up and lash out and listen to the darkest urges humans have. Perhaps it’s partly to do with Burgess actually retelling the story of the rape and maiming of his own wife from the perspective of the rapist. He never condones or excuses his narrator, Alex. It’s apparent that Alex is a monster. But he understands him. Burgess says, I could have done it. You could have, too. It’s a tremendously humane book. And it’s true.

Now story — and God help us, even plot sometimes — are important too. In fact, story is vital. Plot (which is like a mechanical apparatus on which story is presented) less so. So many writers of genre fiction and media get it totally the wrong way round (you only have to look at a couple of recent big budget Hollywood films made around toy licenses to see what crap you get with story-free plot).

I mean, Plot is nothing to be scared of, and if you’re going to dispense with it, you’d better have a reason for doing so. So David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is like in my lifetime top five (and is so science-fiction), actually couldn’t have worked if it had been tightly plotted. That it’s sprawling and digressive and largely plot-free is largely the point.

I suppose I should talk about what I’ve written. I’m not going to pretend I’m of a level with all the writers I’ve mentioned, but I was aiming high.

I wrote “An Angel” some years ago. I was trying to put in words what it feels like to lose someone. It’s really about the toxic grief and guilt that descends when someone you love is suddenly gone. I wanted it, I suppose, to be a story about an angel, too, but that’s really secondary, and I think it shows. I’m not a hundred percent happy with it. I revisited it after posting it here and maybe I’ll post the better (and by “better” I mean “shorter”) version I came up with.

I think I’ll probably leave working on it for a bit.

Memory Sticks is the longest sustained piece of fiction I’ve finished. Parts of it have been knocking about for over ten years; the Grimslade digression in part two, for example, and the character of Alis herself (originally “Alis” was a company system misspelling of “Alice” that she had become conditioned to accept, but I didn’t like that, and wanted to tie the character in with another fiction I was writing, which may get an airing here some time). The novella as you see it here was largely written between 2005 and 2007, bar a bit of tweaking and the ending (everything after the section titled “The best she’s going to get”) which I wrote only a few weeks before posting it on Jet Pack. The ending is the only one that makes sense to me.

There’s a lot of experiences that went together to make poor Sarah’s crisis and resolution (and incidentally, a single personal crisis is traditionally the touchstone of the novella as a distinct form), some of which come from my brief stint as a phone-monkey in a call centre, and one or two of which are directly inspired by a close friend who got the most appalling treatment from the newspaper at which she worked.

I suppose that what I was trying to write about, more than anything else, was the experience of seeing your thirtieth birthday recede into the distance and suddenly thinking one day, what the fuck am I doing? Where am I? Who is this I am sleeping with? How did I end up here… from there?

I mean, OK, I wanted it to work as a story in its own right even if you don’t get what it’s about, but the SF elements are just metaphors for regret and loneliness and, well, I don’t know anything about things like mind control or tiny robots rebuilding brains and it was interesting that in the comments following the one review of the print version — on a dedicated SF site — I was largely rumbled in terms of my sci-fi. As in, I don’t really care about the science or the science fiction, so much as just the fiction. I cannot bear to write a story without at least trying to get a bit of subtext in there.

It’s what interests me more.

I mean, if what I wrote turns out to be SF, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But I’m not aiming to write science fiction. I’m just aiming to write something true. Genre’s a trap.

Truth, on the other hand, is everything.

Saturday, 0730: targeted ads precede Alis leaving passive mode: a happy young woman singing a song about shaving the bikini line; a trailer for a new album by the winner of an Idol Pursuits show. Feeling the buzz of online traffic, smiling, humming the jingle from the razor ad, Alis cleans up her cache, showers, breakfasts.

The first alert from the media subscription activates at 0745, three mouthfuls into her Special K; frozen, spoon poised halfway to open-mouth, Alis downloads the weather forecast, fashion advice, product promotions, digital special offer tokens, the big events in this week’s and next week’s soaps, the controversies from Dancing On Ice With the Stars, Hell’s Kitchen, the synopses of three other reality shows that Alis has never watched and never will watch, but on which she can talk with authority.

She picks from the menu the details of a celebrity wedding sponsored by a chocolate bar; she receives data updates on the fractious marriage of a rags-to-fabulous girl grouper and a Premier League midfielder; she downloads the three singles that will soundtrack her day.

At 0747 she lifts the spoon the rest of the way to her mouth. She finishes her Special K.

By 0851, Alis is dressing — black skirt, boots (heels are back in), white plastic fitted jacket over low-cut top. She does her make-up in attention mode, allowing the style-manager to handle the application of precise amounts of mascara and liquid eyeliner, with deep red lip-gloss. In normal, she appraises her look, approves: fashionably artificial, but not overdone. She fixes her nails, ties her hair in a high, tight ponytail.

She leaves the house at 0915, swinging her bag over her shoulder and winking at the mirror by the door in exactly the same way as the girl in the ad did — she’s on a late today, giving her time for her appointment at the boutique.

She is happy with the contrast.

Alis shows up at the office at 1053 with a new, still-sore NuSB socket on the back of her neck and another at the top of her sternum, peeking out under the zip of her new jacket; a tattooed brand logo, tiny and slightly holographised, shines on her forehead. In the lift, Alis changes the logo’s colour settings a few times before she gets to the top, until she is happy with the contrast between it and her eyeshadow. The processor only finishes installing the drivers for the last of the hardware she had fitted this morning as she steps out of the lift, which expresses itself as a bdeet stop, judder, restart in her direct path towards her post and her work. She cannot wait. She sits down and gives herself up to the company network two minutes early.

Lunch comes at 1330; she joins Flis, Zoey, Genn and Jaxx at the canteen table, sitting down with her Slimfast shake at the precise moment as the rest of the girls, identical ponytails bobbing as ditdit messages pass around and conversation begins. It makes absolute sense to her; no question exists that she has a right to contribute.

— Janine’s going to kill Bradley. It was in the download today.

— I like the Jade AI. She’s like the real thing.

ditdit

— I sexxed last night.

ditdit

— Oh. Tell us the juicy details!

— Boy or girl? Boy or girl?

— I like the Jade AI. She’s so… real.

— Boy.

ditdit

— Oh! Where did you meet him?

— Did you get some new kit?

— How many times did you orgasm?

Ditditditditditditditdit

(Four texts ask for details of Alis’ new kit; she broadcasts a reply; four texts say, that’s awesome.)

— I dumped my boyfriend yesterday.

ditditditditditditditdit

— Aw, that’s bad news.

ditdit

— It was the right thing to do.

— Five times! Personal best!

— Come out with us tonight.

ditdit

— Ooh! What wares are you using?

— Come out with us tonight.

— SexXbox 6.

ditdit

— I’ve got one of those! They’re great, aren’t they?

— I should have done it ages ago.

— Karl got evicted! It should have been Jorja.

ditdit

— I feel like I started a new life. I feel awesome.

ditdit

— Aw, no. That bastard

— That Brian can still dance.

— I sexxed last night.

The girls go to the Ladies’ in twos and threes; Alis stands next to Zoey and Genn at the basins, and they fix their makeup at the same time, running the same software; each takes exactly one minute and fifteen seconds, working in unison. Three right hands reapply mascara, left eye, right eye; three lipsticks come out, screw open, dab on bottom of lower lip, left, right, left, upper lip, a finger to smudge; three ponytails flip and turn; three women leave the bathroom, one, two, three and return to Slimfast shakes which are and will be only two-thirds drunk.

At 1355, the conversation stops mid-sentence. The women stand, silently, and return to their posts.

Second-last.

Saturday night: it’s the same club she went to on Wednesday. Alis is on the dance floor in a borrowed minidress and strappy heels, multitasking. While the software keeps her dancing and flirting, and accurately feigns mild drunkenness, the plugged-in hemisphere keeps her connected: she subs and lays out seven news stories for tomorrow’s print edition; cuts down the news to preset character maximums for online publication; researches, writes and packages the material for one of tomorrow’s media opinion downloads — one of the ones she’s subscribed to, as it happens — on shows that she’s never watched, supplying the default opinions ready to be programmed into people who never watched them either.

Jaxx pulls, another asset from the tower, and goes home with him; Alis and the others stay until the place closes. They get a minicab, drop each other off, one by one.

— That was awesome.

— You were hott.

— Did you see the bloke Jaxx pulled?

— That was awesome.

— That was hott.

— I did! He was hott!

— So awesome.

— Did you see the bloke Jaxx pulled?

— He was hott.

Once the girls are in the car, the girls’ processors cease to run the fake drunkenness routines, one by one bdeet bdeet bdeet bdeet. No one says anything in the cab, really; only brief directions for the driver and the occasional ditdit punctuate the silence as Alis and Flis — Flis has some of the same hardware as Alis (although, Alis has noted with satisfaction, in an earlier version)— receive, edit, submit and get back notice of receipt of small work assignments.

Alis is the second-last to get out, no goodbyes, still in attention mode, still multitasking, as she signals the door, stands in a lift, gets in, takes off her makeup, puts on her nightdress, lies on top of her duvet, delivers the last content for tomorrow’s download, and goes into passive mode.

She chose the venue.

They’re in Starbucks. Alis chose the venue. Outside, the sun is setting

— We’d been together six years. Nearly seven. I mean, she’d been living in my place maybe five years. But we’d had six years.

— So what happened?

Alis, responding to a software prompt, widens her eyes, puts a finger against her chin as if pointing to her lips.

— She got bored. That’s what she said. She got bored. She said she wanted more. We were in a rut, she said.

Alis says nothing, takes a sip of coffee, leaves a dark red greasy mark on the rim of the cup.

— She wasn’t cheating on me. It wasn’t anything like that. She hadn’t found anyone she liked more. She just…

— What?

— She just wanted to be anywhere else except with me.

— Oh.

— I think if she’d been cheating it’d have been easier. You know?

Alis looks blank.

— Yes.
— Because this way, she’s not to blame. It’s like my fault. She doesn’t love me any more. Because I’m not what she —

— Do you want to sexx with me?

He puts down his coffee, looks left and right as if expecting to see a hidden camera.

— Sorry. What?

— You said — and here Alis pauses as she replays the relevant phrases from her cache — that you were looking for a date. That you wanted companionship. You’d like it if we sexxed.

— Yeah, but I didn’t — I mean, I didn’t intend what I said to mean that. I mean, I’m really sorry I said it. I, ah, felt like a fool.

— There’s no need to apologise.

— I mean, it’s been a long time, and I’d been dumped. I said stupid things because I wasn’t… myself. I am so sorry. So, so sorry, Sarah. Please, please don’t think that I’m only talking to you because I want to —

— But you do.

— I. Um. Look, I’m a fool. I’ll go home. I’m so sorry.

— Come back to my flat. Sexx with me. You’ll enjoy it.

— What?

— I have some awesome new —

— You’re not offended?

— Why would I be offended?

— I thought —

— It’s no big deal. No ties. No emotional involvement. Just sexxing.

A prompt: she lifts her chin to a preset angle, lowers her new eyelashes, parts her lips slightly.

— I don’t know what to —

— Come back to my flat and sexx with me. Now. I’ll pay and order a cab.

He opens his mouth to say something, but she goes bdeet and trances out for a moment, before smiling at him and standing up, zipping up her jacket in a decisive, businesslike manner.

— Let’s go.

Pressure.

They ride, silently, in the back of a Hansom cab. She sits right next to him. Her thigh hard against his.

She looks up at his face as he places a hand on his leg, just below his crotch, exerts pressure with the first three fingers, one at a time, pressing down exactly so, precise distances, the exact locations of nerve endings, causing him suddenly to close his eyes, take a sharp intake of breath.

He turns and looks down at her. The processor prompts. She narrows her eyes, parts her lips again.

ditdit

She straightens, looks ahead.

— What was that?

— An alert. The office. Things to do.

— Um. I can go home instead —

— No. It’s fine. You still get to come home with me. We’ll still sexx.

— Oh.

I hope you have enjoyed me.

She transmits to the lights; they come on, low.

— Take your coat off. Hooks are there.

She hangs up her own coat; her heels clatter across the floorboards clack, clack, clack, like a metronome, leaving him standing by the coat rack.

She stops by the bookshelf, takes from the rack the secure access drive, plugs it in at the new socket on the back of her neck so that the grey plastic hemisphere sits at her hairline, its blue LED blinking standby. She opens a drawer on her make-up table and takes a small plastic bag from a packet. She folds the bag neatly and places it on her bedside table. Then she turns and clatters back to Jon, who stands where she left him, looking around, hand on back of head.

She takes his hand.

— This way.

She leads him to the bedroom, relaxes allows the processor bdeet control, bringing two brand-new pieces of software and two impants together without conflict, interfacing them together through neural pathways and nerve endings for the first time. She feels a thrill: she loves it. She’s programmed to.

She hands him a condom.

— Please use this.

He looks down at the little silver packet in his hand.

She sets to work. His clothes come off in a pre-set order. The implant erases her memory of the removal of his socks as he does it, the original developers having recognised that no adequately sexy way exists to take them off. He removes her clothes at her direction. She kisses him, inserts her tongue at the software prompt, puts her hand on his groin, applies gentle pressure at exact points like she’s working the number pad. Trusting in her systems, she opens the multitasker and ditdit connects to the company net, starts the LED on the hemisphere flashing, downloads a story she’s been alerted to; it needs fixing. She defers it until a suitable time.

She loses time. Her consciousness cuts to the bed; he lies on his back. She removes her mouth and sits up; his body judders. She applies the condom. This done, she parts her legs and straddles him. He puts his hands on her waist; his fingeers spasm as the implant activates; the stimulators vibrate in regular pulses, one point three seconds apart, making a sound like a mobile on silent receiving a call. She bounces up and down in times with the pulses, her arms straight, hands out like a ballerina doll, eyes staring ahead, mouth open, ponytail fluttering slightly.

She gives control of her body to the system.

She has things to do. Editorial were unhappy with the tenor of the Grimslade interview; it needs to be positive, reverential. She fixes it, changes word order, removes inferences, applying alterations in time with the pulses. It takes about nine minutes.

Alis temporarily shuts off her hearing; the creaking of the bed and Jon’s cries and grunts are getting distracting.

Job completed, she submits it. She takes a moment to log onto IKEA online, orders a new bed. Seventeen seconds. Back to work: she checks the queue, takes on a few extra jobs to pass the time, another four minutes. Her processor alerts her that the routine is nearing completion. She logs the work time and signs out. The processor activates the neural stim and the reward centres of her brain light up. She orgasms, briefly, lets out a single ah.

And she’s back in the room, just as Jon finishes too. She deactivates the implant, and gets off him, leaving him lying spreadeagled on the bed, mouth open, eyes screwed shut, breathing raggedly. With a swift, precise movement she removes the condom, pops it into the disposal bag and bins it. Jon sits up, hand on forehead. He lets out a little groan.

She sits on the side of the bed and removes the access drive, puts it on the bedside table. He turns and touches her shoulder.

— I, um. That was —

— The shower is through to the left.

She motions, smiling like an in-flight attendant.

— Oh. Thanks.

He stands up. In one smooth motion, Alis brings her legs up onto the bed, folds her hands in her lap, her back against the headboard.

— I’m going to clean out my cache and go into passive mode now. Feel free to help yourself to drinks and snacks in the kitchen before you go. The door will lock itself automatically when you leave.

— Oh, I thought —

— I hope you have enjoyed me this evening. Good night.

He gets half a syllable into whatever it is he wants to say before bdeet she’s in attention mode and not listening. She reviews her evening cache. Memory is an important resource, and a girl absolutely must conserve it. Alis runs her diagnostic. On the Cosmopolitan Satisfaction Index (v6.1, The only CSI a girl needs), his performance rated a 3.8. The recommendation: ditch. She edits the evening cache, deletes him and his contact details. She saves the act, the work and her orgasm. Nothing else.

Alis does not hear the door shut. She enters passive mode, shut down, free of thought or decision or memory.

Everything is blue, and stays that way.

© HD Ingham 2009

Memory Sticks is now available to buy at Lulu in print or PDF from Room 207 Press.

It’s 1127. Sarah, showered, made-up, dressed in logo-blazoned babydoll T-shirt and jeans and Converse, sits on the sofa, leaning forward, chin cupped in hands. She moves her fingers forward, covers her mouth and nose, rubs at the corners of her eyes, folds her arms across her knees. She’s wearing a mic, plugged into her USB and hooked over her ear.

First things first: she calls a locksmith and requests a change of locks. They tell her they’ll be around this afternoon. Then she cancels her holiday. She’ll do the afternoon shift and get the cash.

Then she accesses her address list. At the top, beneath > Account details, > Customer Service and > Faults is > Order Upgrades.

She accesses the entry and highlights > Call.

She pauses there, licks her lips. Later, she thinks.

She backs out and looks at her contacts list again. There’s ten names on it; most of them are office related. She deletes Simon’s entry and then looks at the entry she doesn’t remember adding. Mitchell, Jon.

Does she know a Jon Mitchell? The name rings a bell. But she can’t think where from.

She says out loud,

— What’s to lose?

She calls him.

Five rings.

— Hello?

— You’re, ah, going to think is really weird, but I have your number saved and it’s only been there since yesterday. And I have no idea how it got there.

He laughs, once.

— You’re right. That’s weird. I have no idea—

He pauses, says,

— Wait. You don’t know someone called Sarah Ogilvy, do you? I gave her my number yesterday.

— I— no. No, wait— what? Yes. yes I do. I mean, yes, I am. I mean, um, I’m her. I’m Sarah.

He pauses.

— I thought you just said you were called Alice.

— I did. I am. I mean, it’s what people call me. At work. My callsign. I don’t know anyone who calls me Sarah any more. But it’s me. Sarah.

The sound of something dawning.

— Oh. Right, yes. Hello. Don’t you remember? I gave you my number yesterday. On the tube.

— Oh.

He pauses. Sarah, wondering what to say next, blurts:

— So was there a reason why you gave me your number?

— I just split up with someone too.

He goes quiet again.

— Um, this is going to be really strange, but would you—

— Yes!

It comes out high-pitched, too loud, and Sarah cringes.

— I mean, yes. I’d like to meet up. I’d like to talk to someone. I really want to talk to someone.

They pause again. He says:

— Are you at work today?

— Do you — uh, do you want to meet somewhere for lunch, then? On Monday?

He takes a breath and adds:

— It’s not a date. I mean, it is, but it’s not like that. I’m not— I mean—

— Good.

They set a time and a place, and Jon says,

— I’ll see you later then, Sarah. Uh, should I call you Sarah? Would you rather I called you—?

— Sarah is fine.

They say later, and hang up. Sarah smiles a small sad smile that, if she could see herself, would remind her of the picture of her father. She curls up her legs under her on the sofa and enters focus mode; she checks her work e-mail and waits for the call back from the locksmiths. Then she goes and has a shower and gets ready for work.

It’s not a date; it’s not a solution. But just for one afternoon, she has someone to talk with.

It’s the best she’s going to get.

She’s been saving.

At work, she’s barely plugged in the access drive before she gets an alert telling her to report to Room 207 for a Development Consultation. Sarah is not sure what a Development Consultation is, but she doesn’t think it’s very good.

Sarah knocks on the meeting room door, waits for the muffled come in. It’s one of those rooms buried in the building, no windows, plain laminate walls. Unis is standing by two plastic-and-tubular steel stacking chairs; a young man Sarah does not know who wears glasses and a company T-shirt sits on a third, next to a table on which have been placed two metal kit boxes and a laptop. He doesn’t look up.

Unis is wearing a grey suit, a short skirt, patent knee-high boots. The jacket opens onto her cleavage; nothing else is visible. She makes no sign that she knows Sarah.

— Oh, hey, Unis. How’s it—

Unis transmits a ping code to Sarah’s processor, receives it; Sarah can only judder slightly, return the confirmation of her identity.

— Sit down, please.

Unis motions towards the chair nearest the door.

— Um. OK. So what’s up?

Unis walks to the table. The man stops typing, reaches into one of the metal boxes and hands Unis a flashdrive. Unis walks to where Sarah is sitting.

— Hold still, please.

She reaches over, flips open Sarah’s port, plugs in the drive — a short, stubby thing.

— Is this about the appraisal? I mean, I was having a bit of a hard time and —

bdeet

> An external device is requesting access to processor resources. Permit? OK/Cancel_

— Allow it access, please, says Unis.

Sarah transmits an OK. Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah can see a red LED on the side of the device light up.

— Now relax. Please breathe regularly. Begin to count backwards from one hundred, please.

Sarah takes a deep breath.

— Start counting, please.

— One Hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven.

The LED turns green. Sarah blinks; her eyes no longer focus.

— Ninety-seven.

— That was quick, says the man.

— Ninety-seven.

Unis pulls the third chair over to the table, sits next to the man and stares at the laptop.

— Ninety-seven.

— What are we doing? says the man.

— Ninety-seven.

— OK.

He clicks a menu option, and a second, and when the properties window opens, an OK.

— Ninety-seven.

— Ninety-seven.

The man looks at the statement and whistles.

— She’s been saving.

Unis straightens, smooths down her skirt.

— Ninety-seven.

— Ninety-seven.

Unis looks back at Sarah.

— Ninety-seven.

— That’s fine. Leave her with the last week.

The man clicks the mouse button.

— Nigh.

Sarah’s breathing becomes shallow, her mouth caught halfway through forming the word.

— Debit or credit? says the man in the T-shirt.

— Debit. She has the funds. Inventory?

— Bit of unlicensed ware.

Unis doesn’t blink.

— Oh? What does she have?

— Yeah. Long gone. IP violation, sure, but it’s moot. No one’s going to sue. The spoofer might be a sticking point, though. We make an example of her?

Unis looks across the laptop at the wall, turns her head — but no other part of her body — to the man.

— No. Delete it.

— OK.

Unis looks at the wall, again. Without turning back to the man, she says,

— She doesn’t have any recreational wares?

— Nope. Not a thing.

She taps the side of her chin with a blue-nailed finger.

— No wonder she’s so miserable. No action this time. Put a note on the asset record — flag it disciplinary — and debit her account for the extra service. We’re not a charity.

— Sure.

The man in the T-shirt ruffles his hair with his left hand and lets out a breath; then he closes a browser window and copies about half a dozen files and folders from one directory to another, before selecting the originals and deleting them. On the click of the mouse, Sarah rocks backward, gently, once, the tiniest amount, like someone prodded her on the chest. He opens one, two, three, four executables, clicks the install button for each. The blue bar extends four times. It all takes about ninety seconds. Done, done, done, done. The browser window containing Sarah’s bank account refreshes each time, listing each installation as a transaction, a slightly smaller number in the balance box every time.

Then he goes online, debits her account again. Finally, he takes a silver NuSB drive from the other box, inserts it into the side of the laptop and copies the files he’d deleted from their original location onto the stick. He takes it out, caps it, hands it to Unis.

— All wiped. Clean as a whistle.

— Restart her.

He right-clicks an icon, picks the first menu option. The LED turns blue. Alis blinks and breathes in. She turns to look at Unis. Unis stands up. The man hibernates the laptop, closes it.

— Thank you, Alis. I hope that you’ve enjoyed your remotivation.

Alis smiles.

— I feel awesome.

Unis smiles, reaches over and unplugs the access drive from Alis’ temple, gives it back to the man who packs it away. She hands Alis the silver flashdrive.

— Your archive.

Alis holds it in her hand, looks at it, head slightly cocked to one side.

— Um. Thank you.

Unis looks over her shoulder.

— Ross?

The man packs away the boxes and the laptop and leaves the room without a word. Unis turns back to Alis.

— This session has another thirteen minutes scheduled. We’ve given you access to the company online store for that time. Please feel free to spend the time shopping.

Alis’ eyes widen, like a child given a new set of accessories for her Bratz dolls. She bounces a little in her seat, flaps her hands in front of her face.

— Oh. Oh. Really? Oh. That’s so totally hot.

— Enjoy yourself. Have some you time.

Unis smiles, nods and leaves the room. Alis bdeet enters focus mode and goes online before the door has closed, browses the store, spending spending spending with pleasure, downloading, installing, overwriting, arranging sittings for fittings, until her time is up and she stops dead in mid-transaction, saves it, enters attention mode. She stands and leaves the room without any wasted movement, closing the door behind her, walks to the lift, returns to her post, gets to work.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the final episode of Memory Sticks next Monday. Want to know how it ends sooner? Buy it at Lulu from Room 207 Press.

Sarah eats nothing, gets ready for bed as usual. And she lies down to sleep for the first time in two years. She places her head on the pillow, and bdeet her implant protests:

> Your system has detected that you will soon enter a sleep state. Entering passive mode takes less time, conserves more physical resources than non-assisted sleep and enables you to set your time of waking. Would you like to enter passive mode now? (OK/Cancel)_

— Cancel.

She’s so tired. She sleeps. She dreams.

She is sitting on her Ikea sofa in her London flat and she is young, twenty-one again, and wearing a Summer dress she wore once when she was at college and there is nothing in her head, and she feels the weight and warmth of her hair, feels it tickling her shoulders, has to push back her messy fringe from her eyes.

And she looks around and without her noticing, she has moved, and now she is sitting on a bench in the Castle Square in Swansea, where she went to college, where she hasn’t been in a few years now, and the sun is shining, and there are no people here, only pigeons and gulls flocking on the paving, arrayed around the bright metal fountain, standing on the walls of the old Castle.

She’s alone here. No, she isn’t; there is someone sitting on the bench at the other side of the square. She stands and runs through the birds and some of them flutter around her and fly back and forth in front of her and their wings are all light and shadow in the sun.

But the birds clear and he’s still there, sitting there, watching her.

Sarah walks up to him — jeans, and a T-shirt and glasses and messy fair hair, only his is tending to grey, and a small, sad smile, and she doesn’t care what the brands are on his clothes and she doesn’t know who he is. He is maybe fifty, but although his face is lined, he carries himself like a young man.

And he says to her,

— You need to talk.

Sarah closes her eyes and leans back against the back of the bench, feeling its sun-covered warmth through the fabric of her dress, and stretches her arms out and says,

— I really don’t remember —

And she opens her eyes and she’s thirty-three again, branded T-shirt and harsh make-up and bad hair encased in spray and gel and she looks down at herself and she wants to cry, and the man says,

— You don’t need to feel that way. You’re not a failure.

She sits forward, cups her face in her hands, feels the texture of the make-up under her fingers, sits up. She looks at him.

— I used to think before I died, he says, that you never had to stay anywhere. That there wasn’t anything that could hold you back.

He smiles.

— I was twenty-three. I was invincible, because you are when you’re twenty-three. The fact is, life sometimes traps you. Sometimes there is no way out and there is no chance to escape. Sometimes there is. Sometimes you can get away. Sometimes you die.

She looks at him, intently. Now it’s night, summer night, warm and comfortable. The birds have gone and the yellow lamps light his face from above.

— We have to live the lives we have, Sarah. And we have to take the chances we can. But mostly, we just have to live.

— But I’m not Sarah anymore, she says. What do I do?

He reaches over and touches her face with a warm hand.

— I would have loved you if only I had lived.

And then there is a ringing sound, and there is a chime, a two-tone chime, over and over—

The doorbell wakes her up.

The processor re-asserts itself, tells her that it’s 0917. She gets out of bed and answers the door in her T-shirt and panties, hand on head.

It’s Simon.

— You’ve got a key, she says.

— I couldn’t find it.

He looks her down.

— And anyway, what are you doing undressed? We’re supposed to be going.

— I overslept.

He opens his mouth, closes it, says,

— But aren’t you supposed to not be able to do that? I thought the implant—

— I ignored it. I just wanted to sleep.

— What did you want to do that for, Alis? Today of all days!

She stares at him, as if he’s a broken piece of text.

He puts his hand to his forehead.

— Look. There’s no point arguing about it on your doorstep. We’re not really in a hurry. Let’s get you ready.

He moves to step inside; Sarah puts out her arm.

— I’m not coming.

— What do you mean, you’re not coming?

— I’m not coming.

— Why?

— Because I don’t want to be with you any more.

And it spills out: she tells him that she does not know him and that after two years, she doesn’t know who he is or anything about who his friends are or his family or what he likes and he says,

— But we’re going away so we can spend time together.

— We’re going away so you can spend all day fucking me.

He opens his mouth.

— Alis—

— And you don’t even care if I’m switched off while you’re doing it.

— Is this about Tuesday?

— Yes.

— But you turned it on. It’s your ware. I didn’t ask you to install it.

— Do you want to know why I installed it? Do you?

Her voice is louder than it has been for years. Sarah realises that she’s almost shouting, and realises that she can’t remember the last time she raised her voice.

Simon is staring at her.

— I—

— Because I was sick of being awake while you were fucking me. Because you’re like a kid with a doll, making me do all the things you liked making me do, and I got so sick of it, so sick of it, so sick—

— Now hang on—

— I got sick of it. So I got some filthy software and installed it and turned myself off and let you use me because at least I wouldn’t have to be conscious. At least I wouldn’t have to remember it. I didn’t even want you to know. You wouldn’t have if the stupid thing hadn’t bleeped when I switched over. You wouldn’t have noticed the difference, Simon. You wouldn’t have noticed.

— That’s not fair.

— You wouldn’t have noticed. Tell me, what were you planning to do in the hotel? You were going to ask me if I’d use the program again. Weren’t you?

— That’s not fair, Alis.

— We have no interests, no circle outside of work. We just do these things and you think that small talk over dinner—and you have nothing to say, Simon, nothing to say—you think it’s enough to get you into bed and—

— Well, isn’t it? I’ve never heard you objecting.

— It was better than not having anyone at all.

— So what changed?

She pauses. But she does not move her arm.

— I decided that it wasn’t enough.

— Alis—

— Do you remember how we met?

— You interviewed me. For one of your newspapers. I asked you if we could have dinner.

— Why?

— I fancied you.

— Why?

— Because I did, and I’d never—

He stops.

— You’d never screwed a kithead, she says. And you got off on the idea of a girl you  could program.

He looks away.

— That’s not fair.

— You keep saying that.

He stares at her, his lips pressed tightly together.

— Alis, he says, I have never—

— Don’t say it. You don’t. You just like having me at your disposal on a Tuesday, because it’s cheaper than getting a kithead you have to pay for.

— That’s not—

— Stop fucking saying that! Stop saying it! Who said it was going to be fair? It’s not fair! It’s not fair you’ve had me in bed every week for two years! It’s not fair that I’m just a piece of kit! That’s all I am. A piece of kit. For you, for that slimy old man, for the job, for everyone. A piece of kit.

Neither looks at the other. Simon, repelled by Sarah’s outburst, has retreated across the corridor and is leaning against the opposing wall. His lower jaw is set, and his teeth are gritted together. His eyes are narrow, under lowering brows.

— Maybe that’s all you’re good for. Go bleep and turn yourself off, you stupid fucking kithead bitch. Go be a happy smiley robot for the rest of your life. It’ll save you the trouble, because you’re never going to find anyone else.

She turns into her house and slams the door behind her, has a thought, goes to the bedside table, snatches up Unis’ flashdrive and returns to the front door. He’s still there as she opens it; he turns. She says:

— Get yourself another sex doll, asshole.

She flings the memory stick into his face, hitting him full in the eye. He cries out, puts his hand to his face.
Then she slams the door again, as he nearly screams:

— You won’t find anyone else.

She slumps down in her hall, her back against the door and she sits and for the first time in two years she begins to cry, and cry, and cry. She sobs until her eyes are red and the processor is advising her over and over to go into attention mode and she’s ignoring it because she’s gulping in vast, loud breaths and letting the tears fall onto her T-shirt, onto the floor, onto her hands and she stops and then she cries some more until there’s nothing left inside her. She lets out deep breaths, and finally she turns and opens the door.

He’s gone. He took the flashdrive with him.

She turns into the house, feeling like she’s going to explode, her skin taut like an overstretched balloon.

Her stomach heaves and she runs to the bathroom, clutches the side of the toilet bowl, throws up whatever it was she ate last night — and she doesn’t remember, she was still in a trance when she ate — and then when it’s all gone, she throws up stomach bile and dry-heaves for one minute and forty seconds, before collapsing on the floor, covered in cold sweat and shaking and crying again, crying the tears that have been stored away for two years, for her dead mother and her dead father, and for her dead friend Mica.

Mica was a girl, she was a girl, and Mica died, and Sarah remembers, Sarah knows, Mica died. She had cancer and the doctors caught it far too late because Mica was barely twenty-seven and was too busy working and she thought she was too young to catch it and the chemo didn’t do a thing and Mica died and Sarah was with her, and Sarah couldn’t cry and so she deleted Mica from her memory the first chance she got because it was too painful. Alis cries for Mica and she cries for herself, because she thinks that maybe Simon was right.

Maybe she should just do what she did yesterday, do it for good and be a wageslave dronegirl with a five-minute memory and a programmable brain. She knows one or two of the assets in the office who do just that — Genn and Zoey and Flis — and they don’t seem to be unhappy. Or maybe she could get a right-brain suppression rig and switch her emotions off so she’d never have to feel anything about about anything or anyone again. Or she could get a hygiene empowerment system fitted and get neutered and make her crotch smooth and hard and featureless like a doll’s and have cartridges for her pee and sex wouldn’t ever be a problem again.

Or all of it. She’s hardly gone out or done anything outside of buying essentials for most of two years. She saved so much. She could easily afford to have all the work done and wipe it all away and spend the rest of her life as a drone. She could. Because it hurts so much.

But then again: it hurts.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday. Want to know how it ends sooner? Buy it at Lulu from Room 207 Press.

The perfect glowing blue clicks and is gone; she is dreaming.

Alis is lying perfectly still on a hospital gurney in a hospital gown and there are lights above her and a CCTV camera on the ceiling pointed at her, and she can feel a cable plugged into her head and the lights shine in her eyes. A blank-faced woman with an implant like hers, maybe ten years older with palsied, shaking hands opens the hospital gown from the front and Alis tries to say something but cannot and a short man in scrubs and mask comes in and the asset says,

— Prepped.

And she knows it’s Jeremiah Grimslade, and the man says,

— Very good, thank you.

He picks up a scalpel and begins to operate, to slice open her chest; then he picks up some kind of miniature bandsaw, and Alis cannot feel it cutting into her and she wants to scream and now she is watching through the CCTV camera as Grimslade opens her up and she knows what he is looking for, and then he looks up and says:

— There’s nothing here. Sew her up.

Alis flips from camera to camera as they wheel out her stiff, staring body, and she watches from — click — one camera and then the one in the next room and the next, until finally they come to a room that looks like a lock-up garage with walls covered in shelves full of unusual briac-a-brac and in the back of the lock-up there’s a pedestal with a tall, wide, cylinder of perspex on it and they stand her, naked against what looks like a large doll stand, and plug her head into the aluminium post at the back of the cylinder, like the ones at work, and she is back as they lock the perspex cylinder shut and she is back in her body and she cannot move or speak or scream as the shaking assistant and the wizened surgeon pull the tarpaulin over the display case and she suddenly feels a system send a bdeet signal to her brain and she is —

Lost in blue.

Smiling, vacantly.

Sarah comes out of passive mode at 0730, twists her body and sits on the side of the bed in one motion.

She feels very cold inside. The cold weight in her stomach doesn’t go away, is active, sucks the heat and life out of her limbs. She makes herself a cup of tea, eats a bowl of bran flakes with ice-cold skimmed milk.

It doesn’t make her feel better. She does not have a hangover; the processor deals with things like that.

She almost wishes she did have a hangover. It’s be an honest kind of sickness, a consequence of her stupidity. But no, there’s no nausea, no headache. Just the block of ice that fills her stomach and chest.

She can’t face today, she thinks.

Breakfast done, she goes bdeet into attention mode; gets dressed does her makeup leaves the house gets the tube; changes modes to check the system; It’s possible to live an entire life in an electronically governed trance — passive mode — attention mode — focus mode — attention mode — focus mode — attention mode — passive mode and repeat daily, never dealing with anyone beyond pre-set pleasantries, talking in that precise so pleased to be of service tone, working efficiently and quickly and without ever once thinking of anything other than the job —

And her Thursday is a blank, devoid of thought or incident of note, until 1907, when she is on the train between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park and she is sitting, staring ahead of her, smiling that same small vacant smile, when a voice says:

— Sarah?

The voice speaks again.

— Excuse me? Sarah? Sarah Ogilvy?

She looks up and click beams at him, a tall, slim black man with a shaved head, about her age.

— I’m terribly sorry. Do I know you?

— It’s Jon. Jon Mitchell. We shared a house.

Doll-brained, she recalls nothing, and the woman panics inside, half-wants to withdraw and let the processor handle this; she can’t ignore it. She regains her self-control for a moment, transmits to the processor:

— Pause. Insert statement.

> Successful_

And she click smiles again and puts out her hand for him to gently shake and she says,

— Yes. Of course. I’m sorry. I remember you, Jon.

He wears a slightly threadbare overcoat over a sweater and jeans; the processor registers instantly that they are not branded and flags this.

He shakes her hand and puts the hand in his pocket, holding on to the rail with the other, looking down at her.

— So. How’s Nick doing these days?

The appropriate behaviour filter kicks in and she click turns off the smile for a moment.

— I don’t know. We are not living together any more.

— Oh. I’m sorry.

He pauses for three seconds.

— You’ve changed so much, though. I hardly recognised you.

— but you’re, ah —

He pauses again, runs his free hand over a stubbly scalp.

— You’re looking well.

And she click beams again, says,

— Thank you.

He nods, presses his lips together.

— How long have you —

He stalls; she looks at him without blinking.

— I mean, how long have you had the —

He taps his temple with a finger.

— The implant?

— Yeah.

She trances for a split-second, pulls up her employment contract, checks.

— Three years, Four months.

— Oh. Well. You’re looking good. Well.

She hates this; she hates what she’s going to say next because it’s not her saying it, it’s the processor and the appropriate behaviour filter and the script and she could turn it off but right now she’s scared even to do that because she just wants him to leave her alone.

She click blinks click tilts her head click smiles.

— Thank you, she says again. I recommend it.

He shuffles his feet, looks out the window, and she resumes her posture, smiling vacantly out of the opposite window. He pulls something out of his pocket and writes on it.

He holds it out. It’s a used travelcard.

— Sarah?

She looks up, beaming.

— Here. This is my mobile number. Text me. We could meet up.

He is just about to take it back when she takes it from his hand.

— That would be nice. Thank you.

She looks down at the writing, parses it, transmits:

— Save text to address book; name: Mitchell, Jon— and spells out the number.

> Saved_

The train pulls into Green Park. Jon looks up.

— Look, this is my stop. It’s — ah — good to see you, Sarah. I’ll see you.

— Goodbye.

And he gets off and a middle-aged woman in a Balenciaga coat carrying a Harvey Nicholls shopping bag takes his place, and she forgets that Jon was ever there. She returns to sitting upright, knees together, hand folded in lap, staring straight ahead. Smiling, vacantly.

He liked it better that way.

Inside the door of her flat bdeet she comes out of the trance and flings herself on the sofa, burying her head in a beige cushion and trying as hard as she can to sob, to cry, to shed a tear, beating on the sofa cushion with her fist and trying her hardest to make the way she feels impact her body and—
ditdit she’s got a text.

It’s Simon.

— lookin 4wrd 2 2moro

Sarah sits up, shoulders hunched, hands gripping tightly onto the upholstery beside her. She takes a deep juddering breath, bites her lip. She deletes the message.

He comes on Tuesday, and they eat dinner, and they have sex. And they exchange niceties. She doesn’t know him.

Maybe the weekend will be better. But — Thame? A hotel in Thame? There’s nothing in Thame, and she’s looked up the hotel and it’s miles from anywhere with nothing to do unless you want to walk in the fields—
Or stay in.

Since Sarah installed the software that Unis sold her; since she used it, she has been trying not to think about anything at all. But the horrible, horrible realisation presents itself, unbidden, no matter how hard she tries to hide from it.

She opens a new message, noting with a certain unease as she scrolls through the list that a number she doesn’t recognise has been added to her address book only today. She transmits delete;

> Are you sure? (OK/Cancel)_

— Cancel.

She texts Simon.

— sorry didnt get up weds

That’s it, then.

It’s all true. He heard the processor noise; he knew she’d done it, which defeated the whole point of the exercise; he wanted it. And he liked it better that way.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

Sarah switches back into wakefulness, and it’s 0835:01, and the sun is shining through open curtains and Simon is gone.

She sits on the side of the bed, cleans her cache up. Sarah’s back is stiff, and when she stands up, she’s feeling sore and slightly wobbly. But after the shower, it passes, and she’s fine, and the sinking feeling in her stomach is not a case for a doctor.

She transmits:

— Did I really agree to go spend a long weekend with him?

> Invalid command. Retry?_

— You’re rubbish, Brain, she says out loud.

She decides to take a sickie. She goes into focus mode, just for a moment, and sends a message to the office telling them she’s really feeling too sick to come in, and runs this piece of software that Unis sold her a couple of months ago for this very purpose, so, when the office network accesses her autodiagnostic, it registers flu symptoms.

She decides to pamper herself. She washes her hair — wonders for a second if she should just shave it off like Unis, it’s so hard to work with — moisturises and exfoliates.

Then she applies her make-up (she’s not intending to go out, but that’s beside the point) and puts on a babydoll T-shirt with her company’s logo on it (all her T-shirts have the company logo on them), a pair of fitted Levi’s, and her beloved All-Stars, her one concession to comfort over fashion.

Sarah makes some coffee and sits, elbows on knees, mug cradled in both hands, and stares into space, and breathes, and becomes aware of her body, of the ache in her back, the constant itch at her temple where the skin meets the NuSB port, the spot she’s developed on her left shoulder under her bra-strap, and the constant fluttering of her stomach, which reminds her of the way she felt when her mother died, so long ago.

And she remembers being twenty and hearing over the phone that her mother had died and having to go back to Wales and organise the funeral because there was no one else. And reading the note that her mother had left for her, explaining why she had done it, why she had waited. It comes flooding back, and Sarah thinks of herself for a time as Sarah again, but does not cry, nor makes any sign of what she is thinking; she becomes lost in an internal world apart from the process, ignoring the clock in her head and the infrequent ditdit of unread messages, lost in her past.

And in the afternoon Sarah goes to the bookshelf and pulls out a flashdrive, pops it into her head socket and sits and replays the dreams she had of her mother.

Drowned out.

She’s in her living room — it wasn’t where this originally happened, but it’s where the dream happened and it’s the way it got recorded — and her mother is here again, sitting on the sofa next to her.

— Your father, then, says her mother.

Sarah knows the script.

— Tell me about him.

Sarah’s mother smiles and closes her eyes and — Sarah knows the exact moment by heart — she flickers, freezes, vanishes, restarts, and leans her head back on the back of the sofa.

— I thought he was a beautiful man when I knew him. Oh, I loved every part of him.

Sarah feels that flutter in her chest that comes when you’re afraid, or doing something wrong for the first time, or grieving, or in love. Like her heart is about to fall out. It doesn’t matter what she says, really; she could say anything she wants, it wouldn’t change anything, it wouldn’t make a difference to what her mother has to say.

She goes with the script.

— You shouldn’t be telling me this, Mum.

— I should. I need to.

Sarah mouths the words as her mother says them, nods, feels tears welling up inside.

Sarah’s mother says her name (distant, as if drowned out by digital interference) and reaches out a hand for her, and Sarah puts her hand in the place that her mother will put her hand, and — it freezes — the recording skips, as it always does, and Sarah’s mother is sitting up straight with her hands in her lap. She’s holding something she wasn’t before. Sarah knows what it is.

— I found a picture of him, you know. Weeks ago. I kept it safe.

Sarah knows what she is supposed to say here, but doesn’t.

— I don’t really know, says her mother. Maybe I thought you’d be disappointed.

— I couldn’t ever be disappointed.

Her mother nods, hands her the photograph. It’s a passport photograph, creased at one corner, and Sarah caresses it, almost feels the digital artefact as if it were really in her hand, and not a simulation captured from a dream, filtered through a piece of technology that won’t even let her keep her name.

He’s got short, tousled hair, mousy in colour, unfashionable sideburns in need of a trim. Sarah recognises the same unruliness in the hair she has herself, the same thickness and tendency to stick up and matt. His eyes are brown, not blue like Sarah’s; Sarah has her mother’s eyes, but he was short-sighted like his daughter. In the photo, he wears narrow rectangular glasses, framed in black plastic. The little robots corrected Sarah’s sight when they rebuilt her brain, the better to see the words and the symbols and the recorded dreams.

He looks at Sarah from behind the damaged emulsion. Sarah has played this dream back more times than she can count, and she knows the photograph by heart, could create a perfect jpeg from memory with ten seconds of transmitting, but she cannot read her father’s expression. It tugs at her, makes her heart move. She tries to caress the picture, run her fingers over the edge, the creases, but her fingertips don’t feel anything; she did not hold the picture there the first time. The memory cannot be expanded.

It’s time for the next line: Sarah’s mother shakes her head.

— He always looked so sad. But when he smiled, I melted.

She reaches for the photo, and Sarah is compelled to give it back.

— If he had seen you, he would have loved you so much.

Sarah turns away.

— He would. You know he would. You’re so much like him. You are. I see him in you every day.

Sarah sighs. She runs her hand over her head, closes her eyes.

— I can’t do this, Mum. I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I can’t—

Sarah’s mother smiles.

— No, he never knew you. He died before you were born. I didn’t even know you were there. I found out on—

Sarah joins in:

— the day of his memorial service and I cried so much. I cried so much. I didn’t know whether—

Sarah ignores her mother, talks over her as she goes through the familiar words.

— Mum, I don’t know what he’d think of me. I don’t know. I don’t want to know because I’m scared of where I am because it’s all so weird. But he’s gone and you’re gone and I loved you and you’re gone now and I miss you so much and all I’ve got is a crappy job that took my name away and a boyfriend who I’m only with because I’m terrified that I’m going to spend the rest of my life on my own and I’d rather be with him than not be with anyone at all because I don’t know anyone and I don’t go anywhere and I wanted to be so much and see so many places and now I don’t want anything and I’m barely conscious half the time and you know what, I’m going to go out tonight just to get laid because right now I just want someone to hold me and kiss me and tell me it’s all right and screwing a stranger is my only—

bdeet

The playback ends as Sarah’s mother finishes the remembered conversation; she freezes mid-sentence; so does Sarah, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, yanked into the trance state and out of it again into wakefulness.

> Cache cleanup?_

She takes a deep juddering, halting breath, and then she begins to shiver. Then she closes her mouth and eyes and composes herself.

— Cancel. Save.

Speed is of the essence.

She hadn’t intended to do it, hadn’t even had the idea before she told the recording of her mother, but now she’s showering again — and quick, speed is of the essence before you lose your nerve and come to your senses — opening drawers, breaking out long-forgotten glittery powder for her face and shoulders and glittery hi-gloss lipgloss and mascara and silvery eyeshadow and hair-straighteners and clips and silver nail-lacquer and a chrome collar she hasn’t worn since she was eighteen (and oh god oh god she’s thirty-three and how did that happen and she’s too old and this is just stupid but what has she got to lose but oh god) and a little dress without a back made of silvery metallic scales that she’s never had the nerve to wear at all and a pair of strappy heels and rings on her fingers and rings on her ears and she looks in the mirror and pouts and admires herself and plays an iMusic selection she made years ago at the highest volume she can — which isn’t very high because the processor won’t allow volumes that damage her ears — and she dances ever so slightly awkwardly around the room to what passes for the thumping beat, and wonders why she took so long to do this and why she hasn’t done this before.

Sarah puts on her see-thru plastic mac and grabs her shining purse. She strides, head high, to the door, and stops dead with her hand out for the door handle.

And her stomach flutters again and she feels good and bad and excited and suddenly she’s terrified, and then she sits down and goes back inside and wonders perhaps if she should download something to help her dancing.

— No. No, no, no.

She sets her face to the door and she’s out, Going Out, and the door slams behind her.

She used to fidget.

She orders a G and T, no lemon, and looks at it sitting there on the bar for a moment, as if she’s not sure what do do with it. Then she downs it in one.

She turns around on the stool to look at the dancefloor, trying to be graceful but wobbles slightly and hopes that no one saw her. self-conscious, she straightens the dress and clamps her knees together, locking her heels over the lower rung of the stool. And she watches.

When she was younger, she used to fidget in places like this, but now, no matter how she feels, she finds it easy to be still. Even when the processor hasn’t taken over, the discipline it imposes is easy to maintain. It’s her nature now; not even a second one.

It’s 2307.

At 2349, she turns back to the bar, this time keeping her balance, and orders another drink. Across the bar, she sees a young man looking at her. He’s not bad, she thinks. Tall and slim, not skinny, with a smooth clear face and dark eyes and heavy eyebrows and a strong but narrow jaw. He’s wearing a tight T-shirt with the Prada logo on it. She smiles at him, nervously.

He’s coming over. He’s coming over, oh god he’s coming over here, she thinks.

And he’s there.

He leans over and talks loudly into her ear.

— You’re not wearing a watch, he says. Anyone would think You didn’t care how late you stayed out.

He looks a little pleased with himself. And it’s a terrible line, she thinks. Who wears watches? And she thinks, God, he can’t be older than twenty.

She turns and looks at him for a moment; he leans forward, allowing her to say into his ear:

— My internal chronometer works in concert with the network. I always know the correct time to the nearest second.

— Oh.

He scratches the back of his head.

She remains impassive; within, she thinks, No! No! No!

He pauses, tries again:

— I haven’t seen you here before.

— No.

She smiles.

— Can I buy you a drink?

— I’ve got one.

— Oh.

He looks down. Sarah thinks, say something, say something, say something — she says:

— Do you come here a lot?

— Yeah.

Aw no, she thinks. That’s pathetic. Don’t mess up don’t mess up don’t mess up — the processor goes bdeet

> Analysis suggests that you are suffering from stress. Entering Attention Mode will allow you to take advantage of your full suite of software, enabling you to operate at your peak capacity. Would you like to enter Attention Mode now? (OK/Cancel)_

— No, she says out loud.

— What? says the boy.

— No, not you. I’m telling my brain to— look, wait a second.

He rubs his chin, his other hand in his back pocket. Sarah, panicking, but unable to show it, transmits:

— No.

> Would you like to enter Attention Mode now? (OK/Cancel)_

— Don’t!

> Would you like to enter Attention Mode now? (OK/Cancel)_

— Cancel. Cancel! For Christ’s sake, cancel!

> Would you like to enter Attention Mode now? (OK/Cancel)_

She forces herself to calm down.

— Cancel.

He’s looking at her, biting his lip, one hand in his hair. She realises that she was staring into space, eyes blank, mouth slightly open, for seven seconds.

— I was, ah — she points to her port.

— Yeah.

She tries to smile.

— You can still buy me that drink.

— I, ah, I have to get back to my mates. They’ll be wondering where I am.

— They won’t mind. You can talk to me.

— I don’t think so.

She’s screaming inside, unsure whether her outward poise is a good thing, wants to say, I’m not really like this! I’m not a robot! I’m just shy! I’m just new to this!

She says instead, cursing herself even as she says it:

— I want to have sex tonight.

— I have to get back.

He backs off slightly, is looking away.

— I have software—

— It was nice meeting you.

And he’s gone.

— You didn’t even tell me your name, she says to his retreating back.

Sarah maintains her poise, sits on the stool, heels hooked over the rung. She can do nothing else. And she waits, emptied of anything except the click of the seconds and minutes as they change.

At 0017, Sarah becomes aware of the song the DJ is playing. She knows it. It takes until the second chorus, but she knows it. Sarah’s mother used to play it; it was from a CD that belonged to Sarah’s father, and while Sarah’s mother did not like the music, she loved the CD, because Sarah’s father was fond of it, or at least he played it a lot while he knew her, and the music became symbolic to her of him. She played it when she wanted to remember him; Sarah hasn’t thought of the CD for years, cannot remember its title or the artist who recorded it, but now she knows all of the words of the song perfectly.

This is not the song from that old CD, not the original. The original was sung by a man with a sad voice, over guitars that echoed and keyboards that sounded like cars rushing by. This version is faster, a fake-retro pop-trance track, with girl group vocals, its beat the same as everything else here tonight.
The girls sing:

It took me long enough to get what it means
When nothing ever changes, except the cut of your jeans

Her bladder tells her just before the little advisory ditdit alert that she needs to find washroom facilities.
She installs herself in a cubicle in the ladies’.

On the bowl, she runs through a scenario in her head, evaluating its likelihood: in her scenario, she sits in the cubicle and she begins to cry, and someone comes and says,

— Are you all right?

And Sarah lets her in and they talk and the woman, whoever it is, takes pity on her and they make a connection and she won’t get laid, but it doesn’t matter, because someone has shown her a little tenderness and just for one night she has a friend.

There are two flaws in the projection:

One. Sarah cannot cry. Her composure is rigid; she may collapse inside but outside of her head she will remain businesslike, if not always graceful, like a true asset.

Two. No one would come. That sort of thing doesn’t really happen.

She pulls up her thong, noting for a moment how uncomfortable the thing is, flushes the toilet, leaves the cubicle. She washes her hands and looking intently into the mirror, she fixes her make-up.

She sees something cold and striking there. The NuSB sockets glitter in the artificial light. No one’s eyes are really that colour. No one’s lips glitter and shine like that.

The alcohol isn’t having any effect.

Sarah finds her spot at the bar taken; she finds somewhere else, and watches the club from a slightly different angle. She orders another drink.

The alcohol isn’t having any effect.

She becomes aware of a man looking at her. She turns her head a few degrees, and catches his eye. He breaks eye contact, looks away. She continues to look at him. He looks at her again, looks away, his embarrassment evident.

She returns her gaze to him over the next three minutes. He is watching her, trying hard not to blush as she looks back at him. He cannot look away for long.

He’s slightly overweight, sandy-haired, probably not much taller than she is, his round face glowing in the heat and the strobe lights and the presence of these people. He is wearing an open-necked shirt. One of the buttons halfway down is undone. He, also, can’t even be much over twenty.

He is watching her.

She wonders why he hasn’t come to talk to her; pictures herself in the mirror, poised and statuesque and alien, and she thinks,

— I’m out of his league. He thinks I’m out of his league.

Don’t panic, she thinks. You can do this.

A scenario: she walks over to him, tells him to buy her a drink like she’d tell one of the assets in Sales to expedite an advertisement slot. She puts her glass down, places her hand on his crotch, kisses him on the neck and then full on the mouth, tells him that he has three minutes — no, five minutes — to arrange to leave with her, and that he will be paying for the cab. he comes home with her and they have sex. They will not exchange phone numbers. One, two, three, four. Deal done, transaction complete.

And having evaluated it, she considers it a likely success. It’d work. All she is, is business, all her actions transactions and programs. she will not connect with him.

There is no warmth in this scenario. It’s clinical, a pre-determined outcome, a program. There is no warmth.
How is this better than last night?

But isn’t this what she wanted? Isn’t this why she is here? Isn’t this the best she can hope for? She’ll be conscious; she’ll know what she is doing. She is not submitting to the software, she — this new being Alis, Sarah no more, mind and body part human part artificial — is doing her own will.

But the warmth —

But she should just let it happen —

But it’s not human —

But she isn’t —

But there is no tenderness —

But this is the only way; Sarah is ineffectual; her shyness, painful, all-controlling, leaves her no choice but to make it business —

But —

She sits, paralysed, for nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

She downs her drink and stands.

The scenario proceeds as Sarah projected. He buys her a drink on her request without hesitation; she puts down the drink; she touches his neck and feels his back stiffen, needs to push on his chest to stop him following her when she kisses him on the mouth; she places her hand on his crotch and the small, sudden movement under her fingers shocks her into an awareness of the mechanics of the planned deed, the plugging of flesh into flesh like a cable into the port in her head —

He opens his mouth, fails to say something, and all at once everything crashes down inside her head and her stomach heaves and she turns before he can say anything and walks out and hails a cab and in the cab she gives up and bdeet enters attention mode and trances and gives her address politely and smiles and sits perfectly still; pays cash; steps out of the car with perfect poise, crosses the road, still smiling, each step precisely the same as the last, each movement of the hands and arms a perfect repetition of the last; stops by the door; transmits the entry signal to the codelock; enters the building, calls the lift, opens the door to her flat; removes her coat and undresses and showers and lies on her back on her bed, arms straight against her side, eyes staring at the ceiling, and enters passive mode and everything is blue and the night is over.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

It’s Tuesday, which means at 2000, Simon May comes around.

At approximately 2030, they eat. At 2130 they sit and talk. At 2245 they go to the bedroom and they have sex for approximately forty-five minutes. He stays the night.

They’ve been a couple on this basis for some time more than two years now. Sarah doesn’t exactly know how long the routine’s been in force, or even how they met. Partly because the processor erased Simon’s provenance some time ago.

Partly because it’s become so routine that she couldn’t imagine living without it.

Right now she only knows this: she’s had a bad day.

She gets home at 19.48. As she opens the door, she transmits to her processor:

— God, what a chore.

> Invalid command. Retry?_

— Hah. she rubs her eyes with the fingers of one hand and turns on the hall light.

Sarah makes herself a cup of instant coffee, takes off her coat, and slumps on the sofa. Then she puts down the coffee, gets up, picks up her coat and rummages in the pocket. And she takes out the flash drive.

She puts it on the glass table and drinks some more coffee, regarding it like a law-abiding citizen looks at a bag of cocaine.

— Oh, all right, then. Anything once.

She leans over, and sitting forward with her elbows on her knees, inserts the flash drive in the socket behind her ear.

And bdeet the processor says

> Mass storage device detected_

> Autorun: unregistered executable file trying to run. If you permit this, your health may be at risk. Cancel? (Cancel/Continue)_

— Continue.

> NuCouplePro 7.0 wishes to install. Permit? (OK/Cancel)_

— OK.

And she’s frozen for she-doesn’t-know-how-long, watching a blue bar creep across her mind.

And bdeet

> Your software has now been installed_

She re-starts; it’s 2004 (she always knows the correct time, whether she wants to or not). Simon’s already in the kitchenette. He’s stirring something in a pan. He sees her come to herself.

— Hey. Working late?

He’s got a key to the flat. It’s not unusual for him to find her tranced out.

— Bit of software admin. You know how it is.

He nods. He doesn’t.

He’s made chicken risotto. It’s either that or nasi goreng on a Tuesday, and Sarah realised some time ago that she only needs to alter the contents of her cupboard and fridge slightly to ensure that he’ll make one or the other.

He never shows any sign of noticing that she does this.

He serves up the dinner at 2030 on the dot, with a glass of a decent red and after a few mouthfuls and a sip, she says,

— I had a bad day.

— Mm? Is that what that text was about?

— Yeah.

She puts her fork down.

— I had to interview someone this morning. He was a bit strange. He creeped me out a little.

— Ah. Right.

She starts eating again,

— I had a bit of a bad day, too. We had a team meeting —

Harvey (who’s Harvey? she thinks) has been giving the team a tough time about unmet targets or something, because this client’s family threatened to sue last week, but not because of something Simon had done, that was Laura’s fault (Laura?) and the defence fund depends on performance targets, and that depends on the recent legislation, so Josephine (this is a name Sarah knows, at least) dumped the job of legal research on Simon and after a while, Sarah begins to wish that she had some kind of software for just smiling and nodding and making reassuring noises.

He needs it. He always seems to need—

— Are you still up for it?

She doesn’t answer, stares over his shoulder.

— Alis?

She comes back to him.

— I’m sorry. I was a million miles away. I’m sorry. I’m tired.

— The leave. For the weekend. I made the reservation today.

— I—ah—oh, yeah. I booked Friday through Monday.

She smiles, tightly.

He puts his fork down, leans forward, puts his hand on her free hand.

— Good. Alis, we should spend some more time together. We don’t see each other enough.

She wishes he’d use her name.

We run on language.

Names are part of who we are. We run on language, and we need words to operate, and we apply names to ourselves as much as we apply names to everything else. Naming is what we do, and all names are a matter of convention.

Consider Sarah’s plight.

The fact is, Sarah thinks of herself as 37542/ALIS/f207bc0, callsign Alis; the processor is part of her. She talks to it and plays with it verbally like it’s some kind of easy-to-prod relative on the phone, but it’s really her. It’s why people like her use the callsigns as names, because that’s the thing in your head that talks to the outside world and switches you into focus, or attention, or passive, or receives texts and e-mails and data and installs software and has spaces for extra devices, if you can afford them.

You hear it applied to you every day, five hundred times or more, every time you switch modes or complete a process or send or receive a mail or text or run a program or connect or disconnect to the wireless network or log on to Facebook. You hear it applied to you more than you hear any other name you might have, so you parse it, give it a sound, turn those four letters in the middle into your new name, which is something the manufacturers twigged years ago, which is why the four-letter callsign in the middle of the processor ID always seem to sound a little like names anyway. You stop answering to your own name one day; it’s inescapable. You can’t avoid it. It’s like a barrage, this flood of data, telling you this is who you are.

And the kind of professional field that gets you an implant suite is the kind that can take over your life if you let it.

Which is why Sarah, whose parents are both dead, who was very much single and far from home when she took the rep/sub job and had to suffer the NuSB ports getting implanted and the tiny little robots getting injected just like all the others, finds herself unable to let Simon go, no matter how tired she is of him.

Because he’s the only person she knows who knows her as something other than the reporting sub-editor from the third floor, third seat on the middle row.

She introduced herself to him as Alis — at least, she thinks she did, she’s sure she did, she must have done — and she ends her texts and mails xx alis and says, Hi, it’s Alis when she’s on the phone or leaving him a message. But for all that, she told him what her real name is, the name she doesn’t apply to herself any more or even think about much, and can’t even remember when she’s in thrall to the processor. She recognises that she needs to think that she’s still human, that she’s still who she was when she graduated university, but it’s so hard.

She hasn’t ever asked him, but just once she’d like him to call her—

To call her—

(Sometimes she has to concentrate on the name, focus on it, apply it to herself again.)

Call her—

(Nearly there.)

Call her Sarah.

She’d like him to call her Sarah. Just once.

They retire to the bedroom.

Dinner ends; the dishes and cutlery end up in the dishwasher; they finish up the wine; they sit in the lounge and Simon talks some more about his day and his business and his weekend away.

At 2243, they retire to the bedroom. He kisses her. They sit down together on the bed. At 2247, they begin to undress each other the same way they always do. At 2251, she’s lying on her back on the bed, naked and he’s got his head buried in her shoulder, kissing her neck, his breath hot and smelling of red wine and garlic, and she looks at the ceiling and places her hands on his back and feels him rubbing against her thigh and she feels so sick of it all, and there’s the fluttery feeling in her stomach that you get when you’re doing something wrong because she knows now that she could so easily just—

— Oh, sod it, she thinks.

She transmits:

— Run b:\Programs\NuCouplePro7_0.exe

It’s like a little hourglass appears in the corner of her mind, and she thinks, no, wait, this is no good, he’ll hear the

bdeet

And there’s no one home. She’s not conscious or unconscious or anything else, she’s just absent, relaxed, centred, empty, a drone utility; the processor pilots her body through a dozen routines, each subprogram the software’s response to his actions.

And when bdeet it’s over and she knows it’s 0147, she’s lying on top of the covers staring blankly at the ceiling, breathing heavily and open-mouthed, her back still slightly arched, a foul, salt taste in her mouth and little sparks running across her synapses, in front of her eyes, her fingers still fluttering. Alis relaxes, unclenches her spine, falls heavily onto the bed. She feels sick and when that subsides she feels wrong, exposed, ashamed.

Simon’s lying curled up under his side of the duvet, facing her, heavily asleep. She wonders if he heard her switch over. She slips under the duvet and she sets the processor not to wake her until 0835, knowing that he will have to have left the flat by then. Then she goes bdeet into passive mode, and everything is electric blue.

She does not dream.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.