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?

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.

On my way to work I drive down past Ashbrook Lane. I go past that little yellow real estate office with the guy out front dressed like a dollar sign. I pass by the party supply store and the Pet Palace.

Somewhere along the way, every day, I see this guy. Something isn’t right with this guy. He’s maybe sick or got some other problem. He wears a pair of jeans all torn up and fringy at the bottom. Even now, with that October cold coming in, he wears a flannel shirt, unbuttoned, a gray-belly paunch sticking out.

Every day, I catch him before he makes it to the China Skillet, that little fast-foody, can’t-sit-down joint with the greasy Tso’s chicken. I wait in the alley between China Skillet and the Kinko’s clone. The guy passes by me, and I drag him into the alleyway, and I beat him with a tire iron. Sometimes, I stab him with a kitchen knife.

I do this every day.

I think it’s starting to affect me.

2.

It was two Tuesdays ago that Mary asked me if I was doing okay. I told her I was.

“You don’t look so good,” she said.

“I feel fine.”

“I had to wash your pants again.” She sounded a little annoyed. Sometimes, when I destroy the guy, he gets stuff on me. Yellow stuff. Kind of like butterscotch pudding, but with veins of red in it.

“I know. I tried to wipe it off, but…”

“And it’s just mud?”

“Just mud,” I said. “The parking lot at work is falling apart, and they won’t pay to fix it. It’s muddy. I step in mud.”

And she left it at that, but I caught her looking at me strange a few times before bed.

3.

It’s maybe like that movie with Bill Murray and the groundhog. Not the golf one. The other one.

He’s out there again.

I catch him at the mouth of the alley and drag him in. The dumpster smells like rotten garlic and ginger.

“Guh!” he says to me. He can’t talk. He opens his fishy mouth and clacks those moldy chompers at me.

I kick him in the knee and the cap pops like rotten wood. The leg folds backward and he topples. I hit him in the head with the tire iron. It’s easier than squashing a pumpkin.

4.

I watch TV every night – Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and the news. I always wait for the news to say something about this guy. But nobody ever does. I don’t think people can even see what I’m doing. He passes them by and they don’t look at him. They walk right by the alley as I beat him or cut him into pieces and leave him there. The first few times, I moved the parts. But that was too messy. Plus, they’re usually gone by the next day anyway.

Nobody cares.

“What’s this?” Mary asks.

I look up and find her holding a sandwich baggy. In it is a sandwich. My sandwich.

“Oh,” I say.

“You didn’t eat it?”

“Guess not.”

“It’s ham and swiss. Why didn’t you eat it?”

“Wasn’t hungry.”

I wonder if the guy would eat the sandwich. I consider trying to feed it to him the next day, but I just end up cutting his head off with a camper hatchet.

5.

I decide not to drag him into the alley. Instead, I beat him into a paste right out on the sidewalk. I step on his hand, and it doesn’t crunch as hard as it should. Bones should crunch. This just feels like Styrofoam peanuts in a sock full of jelly.

People move around us, like we’re doing construction work or something.

6.

“You missed work,” Mary says.

“No, I went,” I say. I can’t really remember going. But I know I went. It was part of my routine. Work was part of me.

“They called looking for you. Where’d you go today?”

“I don’t know.” Shit. This wasn’t good.

“This isn’t good,” she says, echoing my brain.

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

7.

I don’t go to work the next day.

It’s weird. I do my business with the guy. I just use my hands this time and it’s not really that effective. It works, but it’s too much trouble to pull him apart like that. He just keeps wanting to move away from me, even when I’m grabbing handfuls of gut flesh and just pulling it away from him like it was moist pot roast.

And then I stay in the alley.

I don’t go to my car.

I don’t go to work.

An hour later, the guy shows up again. He looks the same. Purpled tongue jutting from gray lips. Sores all over. Same drunken stagger, same throat-buried grunts and groans.

And I slam his head in the dumpster. It pops off and lands on a bed of rancid bok choy.

8.

Mary cries when I get home. The sun is coming up. She’s weeping and beating my chest, then she’s hugging me and asking me where I’ve been. I just move past her and get out the set of golf clubs from the bedroom closet.

She says something about me being gone for days, but I know that’s not possible. Mary is maybe a little crazy sometimes.

9.

I sit in the driver’s side, and I think about the guy for a little while. Who is he? Why does he do this every day? He’s fallen into such an awful routine. How did he get this way? How does he keep coming back?

For a little while, I think maybe about asking him these questions. It’s rare that I give him any chance to say anything at all. Maybe I should, I think. Maybe I need to give him the opportunity to explain himself. I look over at the passenger side and see several baggies of sandwiches sitting there. On half of them, the bread is green. Could be the guy is hungry. I itch a sore on my hand and lick it. It tastes funky, but it isn’t the worst. Mary’s right. I don’t look so good.

This time, I decide I’m going to ask him what’s up. I’m going to talk to this guy, find out everything I need to know. And I’m going to give him a sandwich.

As I think this, I go to my trunk and get out a nine-iron. I leave the sandwiches behind.

© Chuck Wendig 2009

Sarah goes upstairs before lunch break is over, connects to the post, downloads the details and she’s gone. She has to go to East Ham this time. A lockup. A photostory. She’s going to meet Unis there. She pushes her sunglasses up over her forehead.

And she gets on the train and sits down and ditdit—

— Speak of the Devil, she says.

It’s a message from Unis.

> Looks like we’re on assignment together. I have the thing.

Sarah re-enters the world. She feels her stomach flutter. She says, out loud,

— Can I go through with this?

A middle-aged woman with dyed red hair and a brand-new business suit by Prada stares at her. Sarah looks away, covers her eyes with those precious sunglasses again.

Neatly side-stepping any further embarrassment, Sarah re-enters focus mode and reviews the Grimslade interview.

She cuts it down, edits out her humiliating glitch, and salvages what she can. It’s a hatchet job. She describes him as “unstable” and “possibly in need of help”. Having created a podcast and a text story, she packets it and sends to the office, for the attention of the other rep/subs.

And she slips into the real world,

Then she texts Simon.

> tonite as usual?

About a minute later, he replies. He’s not as fast; he has to do it by hand.

> yeh. evrything ok?

> bad day. tel u l8r. got qn 4 u

> ?

> do u thnk ppl rly have souls?

> no. why?

> no rsn. 2030 thn.

> <3 u.

She enters the carriage again, and takes some time with her own thoughts.

It’s a funny thing, memory.

The thing about the kit that Jeremiah helped to invent, the kit they installed in Sarah’s head, is that it’s supposed to erase, edit or copy memories. It doesn’t, not really. Copies never come out the same way twice, which is why the processor has an attention mode, so that there’s something else in control when it matters. The edits often reverse themselves. Deleted memories only get wiped from the surface of an asset’s mind.

Sarah may have had that MP’s name from Grimslade story erased, but it might be that it comes back unbidden, as memories do, at any time. As she’s eating dinner, or in the shower, or when she’s supposedly blanked and blissed in passive mode. Sarah knows exactly what she was dreaming about last night, even if the specifics are beyond her. She’s dreamed about it before and copied her cached dreams a half a dozen times, and each time on playback they’re slightly different from the rest of the files.

A case in point: she remembers a text conversation she had with her old boyfriend Nick, who could not come to her graduation. She wonders what happened to him. But as is the way of memories, some are as elusive as others are inescapable. Maybe she deleted it herself, or it got accidentally overwritten, along with that whole slice of her childhood she lost when she had her kit installed, or maybe it got erased the last time she had a software install, for the sake of space.

Likewise, she does not know where Simon has come from, only that she was not always with him, that for a while she was with someone called Mica — about whom she doesn’t remember the faintest details, only that Mica had kit in the head like Sarah and that something bad happened to Mica. Mica was probably a man, although Sarah isn’t 100% sure, and whatever happened, Sarah suspects that she may have deliberately wiped it away. But that is all.

But still, even if she doesn’t know now what happened to Mica and Nick (Smith? Smyth? Smithie? — no, she can’t even remember his surname properly right now), and if she doesn’t recall where Simon May came from and how she got into this routine with him, and why she so dreads her date with him every Tuesday night, it’s still there. It’s just hidden, a palimpsest, waiting to show through.

It’s the job. The implant and the processor and the software and the modes, screwing around with her memories, cutting and pasting and shunting back and forth and deleting. Maybe they’ll come back, those lost memories. Maybe they won’t. She doesn’t get to choose. But it always seems to be the painful ones that she can’t delete forever.

Sarah wishes, as she stares up at the edited tube map above the opposite window, that it was possible for her to run a hard disk recovery on her mind. By the time the train stops at East Ham, she’s kicked back into focus mode and running through some more text, and the cache refresh makes her forget what she was thinking about.

Funny thing, memory.

The door slides back, screaming.

The transmission: handle a story about a lock-up garage containing the effects of a missing business executive, the CEO of one of the larger manufacturers of kit for people like Alis. His whereabouts have been unknown for something like a year, but the lock-up contains enough inexplicable objects to warrant an article in the Sunday supplement. Photograph; write about.

> Partnered with 40414/UNIS/534b07. Divide duties as appropriate_

He was a rich man. His name was Enoch Christopher.

The rain’s started again. Around the corner from the lock up, it’s ditdit a message from Unis:

> u on ur way?

Sarah doesn’t bother to reply; she turns the corner and there’s Unis, gloriously fake like a mannequin in a fetish shop: half a head taller than Sarah; fake skin, fake breasts, fake eyes, fake lips, head perfectly bald with about six different ports at her temple, behind her ear, at the base of her skull; casual in massive outsize trainers, tight T-shirt, tight jeans. Her T-shirt bears the company logo; so does her forehead, tattooed on like a corporate bhindi. She’s had a lot of work done, much more than Sarah. More ports. More kit. The company part-owns her head.

Sarah knows that Unis is actually called Chantelle. She isn’t sure that Unis remembers that.

It doesn’t seem to bother her.

— Hey, says Unis.

— Hey.

— How are we playing this?

Sarah runs her hand through her hair, and then rubs it on her skirt.

— I’ve done words this morning. I’ll do the pictures on this one.

— OK.

Unis leans back against the lock-up door.

— You still want—?

Sarah bites her lip.

— Yeah.

— You secure?

Sarah transmits:

— Privacy.

— Am now, she says.

Unis reaches into her pocket, pulls out a flash drive.

— Hundred and seventy-five. Cash.

Sarah opens her Hello Kitty wallet, counts out the cash. Unis gives her the USB stick.

— Install it in a secure directory, OK. Password it.

— OK.

Sarah pockets it, and the women look awkwardly at each other for a moment. Sarah nods towards the lock-up.

— Shall we?

Unis holds up the key.

— Lets.

The door slides back, screaming.

It’s dark; it smells damp. Unis flicks the switch and an uncovered neon tube flickers and clicks and hums, shedding dim, intermittent light.

— Is this going to be OK for the photos? says Unis.

— I’ll Photoshop it later.

Unis waits at the door.

— Look. I have another assignment. And I have to get the stuff done before this afternoon.

— What’s happening this afternoon?

— Getting reassigned. Got to have it all done by then. Can I-?

— Yeah. Sure. I’ll send you the pics later. Write it up when you have the time.

— Thanks. Here, catch.

Unis throws her the key; Sarah fumbles it, and it clatters on the concrete floor.

— Oops, says Unis. Sorry.

— It’s OK.

— Laters, hottie, says Unis.

— Good luck with the new post.

Unis taps an implant port and mouths the word enjoy. Sarah lifts her eyebrows, gives her a tight-lipped smile, raises a hand.

Unis leaves as Sarah bends over for the key, sliding back the door with an unholy racket.

— I suppose I had better get to work, then, she says out loud.

Sarah gets the camera set up and goes to work, starting with the shelf nearest the door.

>Item one.

A stone, cut in half, mounted on a black metal stand. Inside its grey igneous casing are multicoloured crystals.

> Item two.

An ancient wireless set. It has no power source, but, as Sarah leans forward to inspect it further, she can hear, very faintly, the crackly voices of people who long since ceased to broadcast, a parade of some kind, a carriage. She takes a step back. Her mouth goes a little dry.

> Item three.

A jar, containing, pickled in formaldehyde, a human hand with six fingers.

> Item four.

A jar of ground instant coffee. It’s Fairtrade, meaning it must be at least ten years old.

> Item five.

A small bottle of reddish-brown ink.

And now the shelf above that:

> Item one.

A steel ruler, showing imperial measurements. Along one edge is a dark brown stain, almost like rust, but not.

> Item two.

A glass eye, brown.

> Item three.

A Bible, Authorised Version. Sarah picks it up and flips through it. Many of the pages have been annotated to varying degrees in red pen; the annotations are mostly hostile to the text, and often obscene. She decides to photograph some of the pages.

> Item four.

A violin, strung with what looks like human hair.

> Item five.

A black plastic box, with odd holes and what looks like tape. Alis has to go into focus mode and search the online archive to figure out what it actually is: it’s an eight-track cartridge. It has no label.

> Items six through thirteen.

Seven books, flat on the shelf, one piled neatly on top of another:

6. A nursery rhyme collection.

7. The Errors of Profane Religion by Firmicus Maternus. Budé edition.

8. A paperback edition of Goethe’s Faust.

9. A copy of Weird Tales, a pulp horror magazine, this edition from September 1933. Two mostly-naked women adorn the cover, one chained up.

10. Montague Summers’ translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. An edition from the 1920s.

11. A slim book dating back to the turn of the century with no title on the spine. The flyleaf gives the title: Atlantis and Me. There is no publisher, author, location or publication date. Alis pulls it out and reads a few pages. It seems to be some sort of autobiography.

12. A children’s picture book: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

13. A copy of Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of the Earth and Man by Rudolf Steiner (New York, 1990 edition).

And on the third shelf, this on the opposite wall:

> Item one.

A small pile of women’s clothes, filthy but folded neatly: a torn t-shirt, a Nike sweater, a pair of faded jeans. Sarah unfolds them and photographs each in turn.

The sweater has a small bloodstain over the right breast.

>Item two.

A pair of mirrored sunglasses with round frames. One lens is cracked.

At the back of the lock-up is a vaguely cylindrical item under a tarpaulin.

Sarah estimates its dimensions: height, 1.9M; circumference, 0.9M. She steps forward to pull back the tarp, but as she raises her hand, she shudders for no reason she can explain.

— I think that’s enough for today.

She steps outside as quickly as she can, remembering to turn off the light and shoves the door back into place, letting it screech.

The rain’s stopped, giving her the chance to look over the photos in the sunlight.

— Hm. They’re pretty good, actually.

She pops the card, slips it into an adaptor and connects it to her port; entering focus mode, she uploads the photos to her corner of the office server, and send copies to Unis.

Then she goes to find the estate agent, to get rid of the key.

She’s human again, until dinner at least.

On the tube, she edits the photos and finishes the Grimslade story. Then she sends in her expenses. She’s going to be working late for a couple of nights. Travel doesn’t get included in work time.

She’s back by three o’clock; she walks in the building, doors opening on her ditdit signal, walks into the lift, enters the third floor, walks through the hive having said nothing to anyone and sits at the desk, pauses, takes a breath and bdeet she’s lost in focus mode: adds a title; fixes a comma splice; rewords a sentence; cuts for length; checks spelling; inserts a photograph; adds a title; adds a title; adds a title; repositions an apostrophe; rewords; adds a title; adds a title; adds a title; adds a title

At 17.33, the cursor blinks.

> No items in queue?_

She goes idle; there is only the blinking cursor, black on white. At 18.04 it starts again. At 18.30 she goes idle. At 19.00 her shift ends and she’s human again, until dinner, at least.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

Sarah arrives at the office at 0851.

She nods to Tara, the managing editor, as she passes the central terminal unit and enters the rows. No desks; just three rows, each of nine swivel chairs. They face the central terminal and Management, each bolted to the floor to the left of a brushed-aluminium post with a number of sockets and ports near its top.

She takes the third chair. She’s the first asset here, apart from Alen at the far end. Alen’s already logged in and focussed; it’s pointless saying hello. Not that she would; she’s never spoken to him.

Sarah begins the ritual, swivelling the chair down and adjusting it so that she doesn’t get her back twisted up — most of them don’t bother, and just install something to help them ignore the pain and maintain a professional posture, but Sarah insists on having something she can sit in. She takes a secure wireless access drive from her bag — a small round plastic hemisphere with a NuSB plug on the flat side and plugs it into her temple, and goes bdeet and enters focus mode again. Logs in. Forgets her name: she is asset 37542/ALIS/f207bc0 designated reporting sub-editor salary grade 4. Stiffens slightly, stares ahead, blinks at pre-set intervals. Alis — she’s Alis by way of local username — no longer sees the room. Her lips move, soundlessly.

She inspects her in-tray. She completes and signs her expenses claim, digitally signs it and submits it, connects to the office server, uploads this morning’s batch of subbing.

Thirty-two stories; six publications.

Adds a title. Fixes a comma splice. Rewords a sentence. Adds a title. Cuts for length. Checks spelling. Inserts a photograph. Adds a title. Adds a title. Repositions an apostrophe. Rewords. Adds a title.

> No items in queue_

She goes idle; there is only the blinking cursor, black on white. No thought. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

It’s 0925.

It’s 0939.

Tara looks up again from her own work, waves a hand, says

— Alis?

Sarah snaps back into the room. She stands up too fast, rubs the back of her head with her hand, like she was caught dozing.

Tara taps her temple, twice.

— Assignment. Secure line, please.

Sarah nods. She sighs, flumphs back into her chair, unclips the access unit, runs the cable between the post and her socket. She enters focus mode again.

A name. A significance. An address. Some questions. Authorisation to record.

She flips bdeet into normal and stands. She gets her coat from the cloakroom, checks the batteries in her camera, makes sure she’s got the cables and the extra memory stick. Then she’s off.

Most of the other rep-subs are lost in the system. No one says anything to her as she heads out of the office.

In the third floor foyer, Sarah finds herself standing next to Dann, waiting for the lift.

She decides to do something different, says,

— Hi.

— Oh. Hi.

— How- How are you?

— Fine. Yeah.

He pauses, says:

— So.

She smiles.

— So.

He runs his hand over his shaved head, scratching at the stubble. His nail clicks against the port behind his ear. He smiles, haltingly.

— Are you new? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.

— I’ve been here nine months.

— Oh. What department do you work in?

— Editorial and Reportage. Same as you.

— But not on the third floor, right?

— Post Thirteen. Three chairs along from you.

— Oh.

Silence falls, like someone switched the conversation to mute.

He points to his port as they step into the lift.

— Excuse me, do you mind-?

She shrugs.

— Not at all.

He goes into focus mode, and trances out. Sarah goes into focus too and sends a couple of queries. He’s not working at all. He’s sending a tweet.

— Charming.

In normal, she looks at the elevator wall. They don’t say anything to each other as they head out to their assignments.

It’s the third time this sort of thing has happened in a fortnight. Sarah bites her lip, on a whim sends a command to her processor:

— Disable Invisibility Drive.

> Invalid command. No such device. Retry?_

She sighs, says out loud to no one,

— My brain doesn’t have much of a sense of humour these days.

And she’s down the steps and hailing a cab.

He slips into the present tense.

In the cab, she composes the first draft of the interview article:

— Variously a neurosurgeon outspoken advocate of vivisection and voluntary euthanasia writer of popular books on science and religion Jeremiah Grimslade courted admiration and loathing in equal measure. But ten years ago he dropped out of the public eye abandoning his lucrative private practice for —

She exits focus mode.

— No. That doesn’t sound right.

It’s too late. The cab pulls up out of the hotel. She shrugs, pays the driver and gets out. It’s raining. Her hair gets wet and unruly. She suspects that her mascara is running.

She pulls her coat around her and runs into the hotel.

It takes a full five minutes for the receptionist — she’s in focus mode too, busy organising something or in an online chat maybe — to register Sarah’s presence.

Sarah hands over her ID card; the glassy-eyed woman scans it, looks across it with an eyebrow raised at her. Sarah becomes very conscious of the state of her make-up.

— I’m here to see Mr. Grimslade. The manager cleared this as a venue yesterday.

— Yes, yes. I’ll call him now.

— Excuse me. Where are the washrooms?

The receptionist motions with her head.

— Mr. Grimslade will be in the restaurant when you’re done.

Makeup repair accomplished, Sarah heads for the restaurant.

The rain’s stopped outside; the sunlight is bright now, fills the place, which is all thick glass tables and steel chairs and a wall full of windows and no plants, nothing to soften the effect. Sarah reaches into her handbag and, with some relief, puts on her sunglasses, huge and buglike, like a visor. It’s an excuse to hide.

He’s at a table near the window, his back to the sun, already nursing a scotch. He is shorter than she expected, and older. He’s been gone ten years, but he’s aged twenty. His neck is scrawny, sticks out of an expensive but slightly out-of-style grey suit that engulfs him, looks like a ragged shirt on a scarecrow. A full head of grey hair sits awkwardly on top of a mess of creases, a nose with broken blood vessels, bushy eyebrows, a mouth in a permanent frown, a weak old man’s chin. But his eyes are clear and bright.

He doesn’t get up. He barely even moves his head.

— You’re, ah — he looks at something written on a paper napkin — 37542/ALIS.

— Just Alis. If it makes you more comfortable. I’ll be the asset interviewing you today.

He looks up properly now, appraises her, his eyes lingering over her waist, her narrow hips, her calves and ankles.

— Nice piece of kit.

He apparently tries to smile, the shape of his mouth turning it into a leer.

Sarah maintains her posture, does not react, does not show him that her skin is crawling.

Grimslade settles in his chair.

— Can I order you a drink?

— I’m fine. I, ah, understand you don’t have very long.

— What?

He grips the arm of his chair with one hand, moves as if to stand.

— Your schedule.

— Ah. Yes, yes.

And he relaxes again. Sarah adjusts the position of her sunglasses and corrects her posture.

— We’ll start.

She goes into attention mode; Grimslade hears the little bdeet. He jumps. He looks around.

— Why are you—?

In thrall to the software, she is unable to be anything other than professional — click automatic smile click telephone queueing system your call is important to us voice warmth click automatic phrasing —

— I am now recording. It’s secure. I am not currently connected to any network. There is no cause for any concern.

Grimslade nods.

The questions have already been prepared. Prompted by her software, she needs only translate the data presented to her into English.

— It’s been ten years since you dropped out of the public eye, Mr. Grimslade. The obvious question is: what happened?

He begins. It was about his research, he says. The first book had come out, and he was suddenly wealthy enough to do some more research.

He slips into the present tense.

It’s the book. Jeremiah has done so well with the book. But he had not been in the lab or the theatre for a long time. The royalty cheques kept coming in.

Jeremiah’s fascination with the human psyche is lifelong, particularly those aspects of it that echo bodily functions. He believed that people were all biology; that there were only chemicals and bodily functions. Jeremiah was the first to experimentally separate the halves of a person’s brain, for example, enabling him, along with several colleagues, to come up with the theory allowing the creation of — well, allowing for companies to enhance their human resources.

He waves his hand at her.

— Like you.

It was early in his career that he began to theorise that there was a factor which existed alongside those already catalogued; so that two people with the same upbringing, the same education, and similar parentage could still end up as completely different people. Sure, he knows that there are complex, random aspects of a person’s life that can change people, and that no two lives are wholly the same; but still, he is convinced that there is a biological factor that the anatomists have missed.

He sets out to prove it.

His interviewer transmits to her processor:

— Pause. Insert question.

> Successful_

The implant goes bdeet, and in the same so very pleased to be here voice, she says:

— But doesn’t scientific method depend upon drawing a theory from the observation of data? Isn’t coming up with a theory and then trying to prove it scientifically dangerous?

He stares at her for a long time; she is unable to wince.

— What would you know?

— My apologies. Please continue.

The breakthrough comes when Jeremiah Grimslade discovers that the human soul, far from being intangible, is in fact housed within an organ the size and shape of a pea somewhere inside the sternum.

He immediately begins to investigate the possibility of a soul transplant.

The interviewing asset inserts another question.

— How did you know?

— I knew. It was staring me in the face.

Jeremiah begins with the dissection of dead bodies, but he soon realises that a person’s soul — for want of a better word; he eventually settles on the term augoeides — rots away into a watery liquid shortly after death.

So he decides to experiment on living subjects.

Short of volunteers, and unwilling to canvas, realising that without hard proof his theories might appear no better than those of the creationists he holds in such contempt, Jeremiah experiments on living patients. None of them are aware that they are in the theatre for more than their scheduled operations.

First of all, he extracts the augoeides from a teenage girl who has come for the removal of a brain tumour.

She dies.

The tumour operation went without any trouble; Jeremiah is unsure whether she died of the operation or of the removal of the augoeides. He decides to try again.

In fact, none of Jeremiah’s patients, no matter how healthy, no matter how routine their operations survive without a soul. The extracted souls dissolve within minutes of their owners’ death, which fact proven he moves on.

It is just as well; the hospital manager has expressed concern at the number of patients he has lost. If it were anyone else, he’d be investigated. Jeremiah is too well-known, too much of an asset to the hospital.

They send him on holiday.

When he comes back, he tries another tactic. If he removes a patient’s augoeides, examines it and reinserts it within a few minutes — the limit is about ninety seconds, he finds — his patients survive with no ill effects.

In his research, Jeremiah finds some variation of appearance and texture in the organs he extracts. The augoeides of an accountant he finds to be the colour and texture of any other internal organ. The augoeides of a reformed career criminal who now makes his money through writing confessional memoirs is flaccid, damp, colourless, as is the one belonging to a well-known evangelical minister. On the other hand, there’s a priest, and for no apparent reason that Grimslade can define, his augoeides is as bright and hard and translucent as an uncut ruby.

It’s only when Jeremiah goes beyond the records and examines his patients’ personal lives that he sees the trend. It surprises him.

Individuals with a reputation for honesty and plain-dealing often have augoeidai which are hard and bright; the selfish, the petty, the criminal, have souls which are flaccid, slimy, grey. It’s not always the case, though. There is a high court judge, well-known as a man of the utmost integrity. His augoeides says different.

Education, native intelligence, fitness, have no bearing on the state of one’s augoeides; Religion does, but only inasmuch as it seems that those who profess a religious faith tend to either of the extremes: bright and hard or flaccid and grey, with little or nothing in between. The latter he expected. The former surprises him.

Jeremiah first becomes perplexed. Then he suddenly becomes very frightened.

He comes out his reverie, turns to his interviewer.

— You see? I was observing the data.

Powered by artificial bonhomie she click smiles click, says,

— Please go on.

All this is over the space of about eighteen years. The world changes. He gets a new assistant, a kithead — he stops, says,

— No offence.

click smile click

— None taken.

His assistant, 00113/zara, is trustworthy. She has to be.

— The systems weren’t as secure back then.

— Please, explain.

— I’d come up with the medical basis. I knew the early systems better than anyone. It wasn’t so difficult to change her attitude to the work.

Grimslade smiles to himself, looks out of the window for a moment.

— She was a good assistant, was Zara. I wish you could still do that. It’s hard to do work in confidence these days.

Inside her head, the asset wants to sneer, wants to spit at him and leave. But the program’s still running and she can only smile a doll-smile and say,

— So what happened next, Mr. Grimslade?

Jeremiah programs Zara with the necessary information that she might aid him in his next step: the temporary extraction, examination and re-insertion of his own augoeides. He goes under anaesthetic. He wakes up to be told by Zara that the operation was a success.

He looks at the scan and the notes. As he expected, his augoeides is small, shrivelled, and almost liquid. Jeremiah becomes obsessed with his own health. Another year passes before he decides that something must be done; like all true researchers, he first finds a guinea-pig.

By this time, he explains, he has managed to perform his side-operation, with varying success, on more than two hundred subjects. It happens at this time that two of Jeremiah’s unwitting experimental subjects come into the hospital at the same time.

One, a Member of Parliament of his acquaintance, is here for another minor but essential operation. Jeremiah says a name; the asset pauses, checks an archive, nods. The system notes that the name is sensitive, and deletes it from her memory. The other is a more interesting proposition. She is a terminal patient. Before things went too far, she had campaigned with a great deal of energy for the rights of those who suffered with her illness. By now she has had so many operations that she scarcely notices.

And now she has barely a week to live.

Jeremiah gives another name. Again, the archives supply the necessary information: click smile click nod click.

Jeremiah and Zara remove the grey, flaccid soul of the honourable member and the bright hard soul of the woman, and exchange them. The woman dies, of course.

In the next few months, Jeremiah follows the career of the newly ensouled MP with interest. A miracle: by the end of the year, the man has admitted to a charge of corruption: cash for questions, knighthoods bought and sold, the usual. The minister appears in court, in the newspapers, on TV repeatedly over the course of three weeks; he takes all the blame. He accepts a prison sentence with equanimity. His name is mud; he doesn’t seem to care.

Jeremiah’s experiments are, or course, leading up to his own soul transplant. With Zara’s unquestioning help, he seeks out a suitable subject. This he finds in a twenty-one-year-old charity worker named Mark BJont, who, now that his illness — contracted tragically young — is more acute, is at the mercy of his surgeon.

Zara performs the operation; Jeremiah, under local anaesthetic, supervises. The operation is a success, although at one point, Zara’s software, unable to keep up with Jeremiah’s increasingly urgent orders, causes her to freeze. She fumbles and drops Jeremiah’s augoeides, which, when it hits the floor, bursts into several droplets of greasy liquid. They dissolve into the floor tiles, leaving a stain which the hospital cleaners will later be unable to eradicate.

The healthy augoeides now having been implanted in Jeremiah’s body, Mark BJont is left without a soul; he dies.

With what amounts to the soul of a good man now contained within his body, Jeremiah continues with his life, all the time, waiting to see what happens. He feels no different.

After about a year, Grimslade decides that Zara must once again perform an examination of his augoeides.

And this is where Jeremiah ends his story. He crumples.

The interviewing asset, inside wondering if he is quite, quite mad, outside stiff and smiling and your-call-is-important-to-us, says:

— Please, more information.

— Why bother?

— Please, more information.

— It doesn’t matter any more.

— Please, more information.

She panics, thinks I don’t want to be stuck here please say something sends frantically to the processor:

— End Process.

> Process incomplete. Please re-enter information and retry_

And she hears herself saying out loud in that awful fake-happy voice,

— Please, more information.

The old man sighs.

Jeremiah, it turns out, made sure that Zara showed him his augoeides; disappointed, he arranged for another transplant. Later examination proved that this, too, was a failure.

The interviewing assset understands perfectly, but the process will not, and she is still click smiling click and she doesn’t know what’s more grotesque this vile old man with the obviously mendacious story about transplanted souls or her own processor glitching and stuttering and making her like a faulty machine she says

— Please explain.

He leers at her again.

— Why?

— Your story is incomplete. Please explain.

— Over the next three years, I did it six times. Each time, I arranged for Zara, and my next assistant, his name was Alun — Zara caught a virus and… ceased to work properly —

(The asset shudders, invisibly, even as outside she nods eagerly, at exactly the same degree as she always nods.)

— I got them to do the operation six times. Each time I arranged for the examination of the augoeides three months after the fact.

— And?

— And every time, my “soul” was still grey, flaccid and weak.

Jeremiah sinks back into his chair.

And that is all Jeremiah Grimslade has to say and bdeet Sarah is free and not recording and not a doll any more. He offers his hand and she does not take it, adopting a different kind of professionalism, becoming cold and poised and hoping he cannot see her shaking.

And she is glad she is still wearing her sunglasses, because after being forced to maintain eye-contact, she cannot bear to look in those eyes any more.

She goes to the ladies’ on the way out and fixes her makeup again. Then she heads for the underground. Before she gets to the platform, her processor makes the ditdit for an incoming message and she sighs and goes bdeet into focus mode again and stops dead in her tracks. She’s out of the office before she’s even back from the office; another notification of an assignment, after lunch.

She arrives five minutes after lunch begins, and goes straight to the canteen, buys a BLT at the counter, sits down at a table with some of the other assets from the rep/sub floor: Flis, Zoey, Genn Jaxx, Lali. She doesn’t know most of their actual names. Just the callsigns. She can barely tell them apart: five high tight ponytails, five perfectly grey suit jackets over lowcut vests and hyperbras, five sets of sockets gleaming, five Slimfast shakes, talk punctuated by the ditdit ditdit as they converse in text and speech at the same time.

— Hey Alis.

— Hey, everyone. How’s it going?

Sarah’s input ends there. She eats her sandwich and tries not to pay much attention to the girls.

— Hey Alis.

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

— Did you see the Jade AI they brought in?

ditdit

— Hey Alis.

ditdit

— Yeah! So who’s getting evicted? I bet it’s Karl.

— Hey Alis.

— I like Karl, please don’t let it be Karl.

— That Myleene can really dance. It was in the download today.

— I sexxed last night.

— Hey Alis.

— It should be Jorja. It totally should be Jorja.

ditdit

— Oh! Tell us the juicy details!

— Janine’s planning to kill him though. It was in the download today.

ditdit

— Oh! Was it a boy or a girl?

ditdit

— Next Thursday I think.

— Oh! Where did you meet her?

— Oh! How many times did you orgasm?

ditdit

— The Jade AI’s getting upgraded. It was in the download today.

— Oh! What software did you use?

— Oh! Was it good?

— I sexxed last night.

ditdit

ditdit

Sarah doesn’t enjoy the sandwich. The bacon’s overcooked. The lettuce is limp. She throws half of it away.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks on Monday 29th June.

She isn’t supposed to remember, she’s supposed to have archived it, but sometimes things come back. Lying in passive mode, caught in nirvanic bliss, she experiences it again, only not as herself. As a viewer watching a pixillated, corrupted video capture.

The boy in the next seat nudges her.

She experiences a brief panic, thinking that she’s slept through graduation. The chair on the other side is empty. The boy says, It’s your turn, and she stands, nearly sprints, knowing that she has not heard her name.

She gathers herself, slips behind the curtain into the wings. A short, kindly-faced, bespectacled lecturer in a velour jacket smiles, straightens her cape and mortarboard. There is a pause in the recollection, a brief freeze, digital interference as they call her name; it is not there in the recording.

Not that she doesn’t know what her name is; it’s there on her record; she can access it at any time. But it’s not her name, and even in these jerky, detached dreams, the name is never applied to her; blocks of colour and messed-up-digital-signal faces and voices obscured by blocks of colour and black-and-white; and the memory of feeling is not feeling.

The Vice-Chancellor asks her, Did you enjoy your time here? She smiles and nods and shakes his hands and that’s it, and she’s off the platform with a degree. End of her student life.

The frame freezes and degrades; the scene changes: she’s outside now, lost in a flow of families, clumps of friends sharing stories, making plans, saying goodbyes.

She congratulates Ana, Diane and the Rachels, finding each in turn in the crowd. Each goes off with mum, or dad, or in Diane’s case both.

She pulls out her mobile and turns it on. No messages. She composes a text.

—hows the job?

She picks a recipient — the name refuses to resolve itself in her eyeline, pixillates— hits send. The reply comes back in a few seconds.

—fab. u graduated now?

—yeh

—hungover + busy. can i call u l8r?

—ok <3 u

—<3 u 2

The Rachels find her again and they pose outside for the throwing-mortarboards-into-the-air photo.

They hug. They say goodbyes. They promise to stay in touch.

She feels some sort of discomfort; she should be waking up now. But she’s stuck in passive mode, and her restart time is set. She must see it through.

The freeze this time is like the over-and-over dream-loops she’d sometimes experience before she got the kit installed, when she was stressed or wired on caffeine or flu-ridden, where she’d have the same line of thoughts, trivial things, running round and round and round, over and over, round and round, making her turn over repeatedly, mechanically, like her brain was a scratched DVD, only the hardware makes that less a simile, more literal, makes it click. She hears the noise a mobile signal does when the handset’s held up next to a pair of cheap pc speakers. The same face, saying goodbye, runs through and freezes six times, degrades more each time and holds. Then it flicks off, and there is only the deep artificial blue in her head, only blue; her mind clicks into standby, able only to perceive the blue, to understand the blue. Her mind is blue.

An hour/year/second later, she clicks into another dream.

She is in her flat, walking through a series of things she doesn’t have any more. Each item deletes itself as she walks past:

• A mug, not hers, blue, chipped around the rim, on a table, half-full of this morning’s cold coffee. Deleted.

• The employment section of the Guardian, clipped out, pinned to the notice board. Deleted.

• The notice board. Deleted.

• The plasma-screen TV/DVD. Deleted.

• A teddy bear, old, wearing a grubby yellow T-shirt. Deleted.

• The duvet, plain green. Deleted.

• A rack of DVDs (hers: Love, Actually, Cinema Paradiso, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; not hers: I, Robot, Collateral, Watchmen, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Spider-Man 3). Deleted.

• The bookshelf.

She stops at the bookshelf and picks up a copy of some novel that had belonged to her mother, and before her mother, to her father. She has never read it. It resolves itself into nothing out of her hands, before she can even take in the title.

The flat is new, sterile, one of the ones they built after the earthquake. In the dream, now that the clutter has resolved itself away, it’s exactly as it is in life (sort of open plan; only the bedroom and bathroom are closed off; all white, apart from the book case, a heavy, ornate Victorian piece, now bereft of books apart from a half-dozen user manuals, a rack of back-ups on NuSB flashdrives, neatly arranged). Looking at it, remembering what it represents, she feels—feels—a profound sadness. She turns back into the room.

Her mother is sitting on the white IKEA sofa.

She sits down next to her mother. Mum looks exactly as she remembers, from when she was a little girl. She rests her head in Mum’s lap and says,

— Why couldn’t you have found someone?

A freeze.

She is not on the the sofa anymore. She stands on the other side of the room. A girl of about six whom she does not recognise is having the conversation.

— I was watching this thing on the telly. And there were kids on it. And they had a mum and a dad.

Mum strokes the little girl’s hair.

— Yes?

— I want a dad, Mum.

Mum begins to cry. The little girl begins to cry too and says how sorry she is. She gets up and goes over to the brushed aluminium kitchen table, where there is a pad of paper and a box of wax crayons, and she watches the girl draw a picture of her and her mummy, labelled with her name — pixillated out — and Mum’s name. The girl goes back to Mum (who still sits on the brand-new sofa), gives her the picture and says she is sorry, and Mum holds the little girl so very tightly and says,

— No, no. That wasn’t it. I love you.

Freeze.

She turns away. On the table is the box of her mother’s things that she had to go through after — and she does not need to open the box to know that the picture, all yellow and folded and unfolded so many times it’s falling apart, is in there.

The whole room shudders and pixillates again, resolves; Mum sits on the kitchen chair.

She starts to speak.

— You were the grand-daughter of feminism, you know. You don’t get that any more. Feminist parents are dinosaurs now. They’re extinct. But my mother — your grandmother — used to take me on marches. We visited Greenham Common that one time. All these women. Lovely women. Outside an American missile base. I don’t remember much about it. I was six. My father picked us up at the end of the week, so I could go back to school. None of the other mums talked much to my mum on Monday, and one of them said something to her that upset her a lot. I didn’t understand until a lot later.

Mum pauses, as if listening to something no one is saying.

— Yes, Yes. They changed things. Just a little. My generation lost that. We’re not for anything at all. I wonder what you’ll do. You think I’m naïve, of course.

Mum freezes out, and then she is gone.

And click it’s all blue again and then the time is up, and Sarah comes out of passive mode and into normal. She shakes her head, runs her hand through her hair, clicks a fingernail across the NuSB ports at her temple.

The little speaker under her chin goes bdeet and Sarah enters focus mode; she runs the usual diagnostic. Everything becomes clear and uncluttered, sharp. Non-words flash in her head, understood without really being thought:

> cache clean-up? _

Sarah pauses, bdeet leaves focus mode. She sits with the heel of her hand on her forehead, fingers touching her scalp.

And then she sighs, sits up straight, re-enters the trance. She sends the signal back:

— Backup.

> insert media_

Precisely, quickly, Sarah raises her right hand, flips open the NuSB ports. She unspools a lead from the dock on sitting on her bedside table and plugs it in.

— Move.

When it’s copied over to the external hard drive, Alis backs the whole thing up on to a NuSB stick, unchecking the rewritable? box, ejects it. She unhooks the cable, closes the port, gets up, walks to the bookshelf in five perfectly equal steps, slots the flashdrive into the rack alongside the others.

> cache clean-up? _

Sarah leaves focus mode and goes normal again, bdeet. She blinks, looks around, runs her thumbs over the corners of the rack of NuSB sticks, bites her lower lip. Then she sighs, once. Still standing next to the bookcase, one hand on the mahogany, she re-enters focus mode.

— OK.

Head clear for the time being, Sarah takes a shower, gets dressed (grey Prada suit with an above-the-knee skirt, white off-the-shelf blouse, low heels by Vuitton), does her make-up.

It’s a ritual: she needs the make-up, the lipstick, blush, shadow and mascara. It makes her feel like a girl again.

But she always feels vaguely dissatisfied with the result. There’s always too much. The kit regulates the way she holds herself, and it makes her feels like a mannequin; the mirror becomes high-street glass, her face immobile.

Time to go.

She connects to the company network between Green Park and Piccadilly Circus, joins the row of men and women sitting there, not quite there, their eyes not quite focussed, their lips moving silently as they delete spam e-mails, organise daily shift patterns, send texts to business contacts, arrange daily meetings, check the progress of system builds, preview page layouts.

What in the world did people do before there was wi-fi coverage on the Piccadilly line?

© HD Ingham 2009

We’ll be serialising Memory Sticks over the next few weeks. Look out for more updates.

I never thought too hard about that. The guardian angels, I mean. Does everyone have them? Are they all so efficient? Do they all do their job adequately?

My own angel’s name is Daniel. He lost his faith some time ago. Maybe he wanted to do more than he could and fell short of his goals. Maybe he felt that circumstances thwarted his attempts to prosper and protect me. Maybe he was just lazy, but couldn’t see that, blaming everything but his own inaction. Did he do enough? I don’t know.

I imagine him as being like me, trying, but not trying too hard, bewailing the lack of breaks he got, the lack of opportunities which he really has no right to expect. Like me.

Whatever. Daniel began to doubt his place. He doubted whether God had given him the power to achieve anything. He achieved nothing. He began to wonder if he was just unlucky, surely a hard thing for an angel born into the sure knowledge of the providence of God to come to believe. But he did. He began to think that no justice could exist. He began to think that God either couldn’t do anything or didn’t care and wouldn’t.

I don’t know if Daniel is right. But right doesn’t have much to do with these things. Daniel lost his faith in himself, and then he lost his faith in God. Oh no, you’re thinking, oh no, an angel can’t lose his faith in God, because where would that leave us? And if you’re more theologically inclined, you’re thinking, how can this happen? An angel has no free will. If an angel loses his faith, who can be responsible for that but God?

Don’t ask me. It wasn’t long ago that it was all sure and sorted in my head. Now I don’t know. But I know that Daniel made his own decision. No one compelled him. His failure to achieve was his own doing. His doubts were his own and his loss of faith his own loss.

Daniel didn’t notice when he fell. He doesn’t know when it happened, just that one day he realised that God began to give him no time, no help, no notice, and that his praises to the Almighty began to be rote, and parroted, and empty.

He fell. But he was still my angel, and he is my angel still, even now. He just carried on doing his job. He takes no joy in the work, but there is nothing else for him to do.

He’s still in denial, really. He can’t bring himself to look in the mirror most mornings. He can’t bring himself to take note of the way that the feathers on both pairs of wings have become charred and greasy like a well-used grill pan, and he won’t acknowledge that the teeth in the mouth of his calf’s head have become sharp and yellow.

Daniel still writes to his colleagues. He never saw them much to begin with, and they communicated a lot through letters. He writes to them now of his fears and the doubts which consume him. They don’t write back anymore. But he keeps on writing.

(“Dear Uriel,
I sometimes wonder why so much of what happens to the people we’re supposed to guard is so bad. Why are we so ineffectual?”)

he saw one of his colleagues a few weeks ago, in the distance, all light and halo and shining wings, looking down benevolently on his sleeping charge. Daniel looked down and fingered one of his feathers, and he felt it come away in his hand, and he looked at it, all black and filthy. He held it in a bony black-nailed hand that he couldn’t recognise as his own. So he hid. He ran away before the angel could see him.

Daniel is finding other people to blame. He iswondering if this was my fault. He has begun to wonder if I’m not a hopeless case. I think that he is gradually beginning to hate me. If I won’t be helped, then why not just make me go down the path that I was always destined to do? So now he nudges my elbow. He tells me things to make me doubt myself and make me doubt my own faith.

And he kept me self-obsessed, so that I could not see what was wrong, and what she was going to do, and I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t able to stop her, and now I am here at a funeral.

He thinks it’s all my fault, you see. But it isn’t.

I think that maybe we deserve each other.

© HD Ingham 2009

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