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.

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.

“Breakfast,” he reminded himself, and focused his eyes on the treats inside the box.

His bleary gaze scanned over the options. Captain’s Wafer crackers? Probably a good idea given the pulsing hangover that lived in his brain and gut, but the idea of dry carbs just wasn’t doing it for him. Pretzels? Meh. He’d rather eat a handful of sand.

Wait. Oh yeah, there it was. Chocolate.

Damn yeah.

A yellow wrapper caught his attention. Top right corner of the machine.

Flix Bar.

He’d never had one. Never heard of one, actually.

Blinking, he popped his quarters into the slot, and punched the code. The metal coil uncoiled, sending the bar plummeting to the bottom with a bang.

<*>

Donnie watched the farm report – well, the farm report was on, but who really watches the farm report? – and examined the Flix Bar.

Yellow wrapper, as noted. “Flix Bar” written in blue letters bordered by pink. A little green thing, some kind of alien by the look of it, held up a pair of delighted jazz-hands next to the logo. Big smile, too, on that alien. Purple teeth grinning.

He tore the bar open.

Inside, a dark chocolate brick.

He smelled it. Strong cocoa smell. Or cacao. Or whatever.

Using his front teeth like a rabbit, he bit the end off the candy bar. The taste of honey hit his tongue. Some kind of sweet syrup – not quite caramel, definitely not nougat – connected with the roof of his mouth and he had to lick it off.

“Oh, man,” he mumbled through the sweetness, “that’s good.”

The texture was just right, too. Soft chocolate, wet honey-goo, crunchy flake wafer. He picked a gobbet of candy from a back molar, savoring it, then glanced at the alarm clock next to the bed. Donnie had to move a half-empty bottle of tequila and a pair of dirty socks to see it.

“Ah, crap.”

He was going to be late for work. Again.

<*>

That didn’t stop him from grabbing two more Flix Bars from the machine on the way out, of course.

<*>

Bob Horkin, with his smashed-flat nose and puckered butthole eyes, came over and dropped a stack of pink forms in front of Donnie.

“Late again,” Horkin said, sniffing, snorting, gloating.

Donnie rubbed his temples with his thumbs. His head throbbed.

“Mm,” he answered, squinting.

“Tie one on last night?”

Donnie mustered a nod.

“How long’s it been now?” Horkin asked.

“How’s long’s it been since what, Bob?”

“C’mon, Donnie. Since Tracy left you.”

“Week. And one day. Thanks for your sensitivity, by the way.”

Horkin shrugged. “You really knock her up? That why she left?”

“Bug off, Horkin.”

“You gonna get those forms filled out today?”

Donnie gritted his teeth. The guy’s voice was like sandpaper on his frontal lobe. “Didn’t I just say to bug off? Bug off. Shoo.”

“Gimme one of those Flix Bars, and I’ll leave.”

Next to the mountain of pink forms, and only a few inches from the leaning tower of blue forms, sat the two Flix Bars he’d purchased earlier.

“You like Flix Bars?” Donnie asked.

“Always have.”

“Then, no, you can’t have one. Go away.”

Horkin made some exhalation of disgust – a pfah! sound – and marched off. Donnie didn’t need him as a friend. Denying that man pleasure was the only measure of satisfaction he could muster. To bring up Tracy? Low. His heart hurt just thinking about her. Like someone had tied a boat anchor to it, and the weight was dragging it into his guts. He didn’t deserve this. Maybe he deserved the hangover, sure. But not the heartache.

“One of those candy bars for me, man?”

Donnie looked behind him, found Tabor bringing the mail cart with the one squeaky, epileptic wheel. Tabor was huge, hunkered over that cart like Godzilla playing pinball. The fact that the cart was painted white and Tabor was about the darkest shade of black outside of a midnight sky during a lunar eclipse, it only enhanced the visual.

“As a matter of fact,” Donnie said, “it is.” And it was, too, no lie. He tossed a Flix Bar back, and Tabor caught it in the palm of one tennis racket hand.

Tabor pulled up an empty chair.

“How you holding up, brother?” he asked.

“Yeah, let’s not talk about that.”

The big dude’s lips formed a surprised ‘o.’

“What?” Donnie asked.

“It’s your breath, man. You don’t need to tell me how you’re doing, because your breath tell the whole damn story. Smells like someone poured tequila on a dead possum and shoved it in your mouth to pickle for a couple days, maybe weeks.”

“I drank some.”

“Some?”

“Most. All. Just eat your Flix Bar.”

Tabor crumpled the wrapper, shot it at a wastebasket and missed. Shrugging, he bit his candy bar in half. It formed a swollen lump in his cheek as he chewed.

“Like it?” Donnie said. “I figured you might wanna try one.”

“Try one? I love these things.”

“Oh, you had one before? This was my first.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Yeah, right what? I’ve never had a Flix Bar before.”

“Who hasn’t had a Flix Bar? That’s like someone saying they’ve never had a can of Coke or a Big Mac. You living in a cave in Afghanistan or something?”

“Shut up, I’ve never even seen one of these before.”

Tabor pitched the second half of the Flix Bar into his maw and chomped away. He waved a dismissive hand at Donnie. “Whatever, man. You’re still drunk, that’s what I’m hearing you say.” He stood up, swung the chair back under an empty cubicle desk. “Never had a Flix Bar before, my ass. I’ll see you later, Donnie. Stay sane, brother.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

“Fine. Uh-huh.”

<*>

It was a curious thing, how alcohol cured a hangover. It’d be like if getting punched in the face a second time helped the pain of the first.

He couldn’t do tequila, though, so tonight it was cheap wine. Tasted like fake strawberry. Came in a box. Perfect.

“I’m going to rot my teeth out of my head,” he said to himself as he unwrapped another Flix Bar.

He started to crumple the wrapper, but then uncrumpled it.

On the back, he read: “Made by Perigree!”

Never heard of them, either. Must be a new company, he figured.

As he licked smears of chocolate from the corners of his mouth and the flats of his front teeth, Donnie thought about Tracy. It was hard not to, which was what the wine was for – to smother those thoughts beneath pillows (of rock salt and sackcloth). Drowning was probably the better metaphor, but Donnie didn’t much care.

He wondered aloud what she was going to name the kid.

“Boy or a girl?” he asked nobody. Appropriately, nobody answered.

Stupid kid. Stupid Tracy, wanting to have a kid.

“I’m not stupid.” He licked his lips and reached for the remote. “I’m smart.”

<*>

The fruity wine, now half-empty, was starting to gross Donnie out. The sweet candy treats – four Flix Bars by this point, he was going to have the worst case of acne – weren’t helping. He wanted something salty. Maybe pretzels, even though, you know, blah, yuck. Instead, he just sat propped up against the headboard of the bed, flicking through channels, feeling queasy.

Buzzing past a channel, he caught a glimpse of something.

Green alien. Purple teeth.

Waggling jazz-hands.

He flicked back.

“—proud to announce the 50^th Anniversary Flix Bar! Inside every special edition Flix Bar is a secret code! Text message the code to this number –“

Sure enough, a number flashed on the screen below the dancing alien.

“—and Flixy the Moon Alien might call you back to tell you you’re a winner!”

“What do I win?” Donnie asked the television. Being half-drunk and three-quarters queasy, he believed that the television could probably hear him. He was not disappointed. The screen erupted in colors. The alien put a few new moves into his dancing: a little disco spice, a dash of Travolta, a pinch of roller rink panache. It made Donnie dizzy just watching it.

“You win a lifetime supply of Flix Bars!”

“Ugh.” His stomach roiled at the thought.

Wait.

The 50^th Anniversary?

“I call bullshit!” Donnie stammered.

No way this stupid candy bar had been around for fifty years. It couldn’t have been around for five years, much less fifty.

“Screw you, Flixy! Moon Alien bastard!”

Donnie pitched the remote at the television. It caught the corner, and spun upwards in an erratic mid-air pirouette. It hit the wall and exploded into many pieces.

“Serves you right, remote control.”

Sometime soon after, Donnie found himself in the bathroom, throwing up.

Sometime soon after that, Donnie passed out in the tub.

<*>

His head was ringing.

No. Wait. Phone.

A phone was ringing.

Somehow, he managed to crawl out of the tub and slug himself to the nightstand by the bed. The alarm clock told him it was just past two in the morning.

He answered the phone.

“Guh,” he said.

“Donnie.”

“Tracy,” he said, surprised. His mouth turned to cotton. He felt suddenly very awake, very sober. “How’d you –?”

“Find you? Tabor gave me the motel name.”

“Oh.” She sounded like she’d been crying. “Have you been crying?”

She sniffed. “I did it.”

“What? Did what?”

“I had an abortion.”

Silence. Crickets. Tumbleweeds.

“Well, that’s good, right?” he asked, finally.

She didn’t say anything. Just another sniff.

“Now we can get back together,” he said. It was true. Wasn’t it? Couldn’t they? No baby to drag them down? No sudden pressure to get married, raise a litter?

She said nothing. Nada. Just her, breathing. Just transmissible grief.

“Babe –“ he tried.

“It’s over,” she said. “We’re done. I just wanted – I just needed you to know.”

“Trace –“

Click.

He tried calling her back.

Went straight to voicemail.

“Guh,” he said, and curled up in a ball.

<*>

At work, everything hurt. The fluorescent light pried open his eyes like a demon with hands of white fire. The demon tore open his eyelids and kicked him in the pupil repeatedly. His mouth tasted of brine-soaked gym socks. His lips were dry like balsa wood.

Everyone was looking at him. Eyes peered over cubicle walls. Whispers and murmurs drifted around; he caught his name, periodically.

Even Horkin seemed suddenly sensitive.

The pig-faced jerk brought by another ream of forms to add to the still-existing pile resting on Donnie’s desk.

His beady stare drifted up and down Donnie, then he laughed, all nervous-like.

“You probably don’t need these, right now,” Horkin said. He picked the forms back up.

“Your voice sounds like hammers,” Donnie said.

“I’ll bring these back later,” Bob said, retreating.

Sometime later, Tabor came up behind him, rested one of those hamhock hands on Donnie’s shoulders (though in his defense, it was as gentle a touch as Donnie had felt, almost as if Donnie would break into little fragments if he wasn’t handled with the uttermost gingerness).

“Lunch time, man,” Tabor said.

“Not hungry,” Donnie managed.

“I think we need to go out somewhere. Right now.”

“Can’t. Work to do.” Not that he was doing it. Stupid work.

“Donnie?”

“Tabor.”

“You know you’re wearing sweatpants? And a robe? No shirt?”

It was news to him. He looked down. Sure enough, gray pair of sweatpants (with a few chocolate stains on the thighs, thankfully upfront and not behind him), ratty hotel robe, and – whoops – no shirt. Sweat beaded in his meager chest hairs.

“Huh,” Donnie said. “Uh-oh.”

<*>

It was a gray day outside, bleak and bleary and with clouds that looked like hairballs bobbing across the steely expanse. Tabor drove – a hatchback Honda far too small for his hulking musculature – and Donnie sat in the passenger side, lying against the seatbelt strap, moaning.

Tabor wanted to talk. He was friends with both Donnie and Tracy, he said. Wanted to help everybody.

“Then help us get back together,” Donnie said.

“Don’t work like that, dude. Abortion’s some rough stuff.”

“So she told you.”

Tabor paused. “Yeah. She told me.”

“She regrets it,” Donnie said. “I heard it in her voice.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.” Lie. Big lie. Gigantor lie with crushing feet. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“I’m hungry,” Tabor said.

“Super. I’m sitting here, my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin filled with bees, and I’m pouring my heart out – in a conversation you started, by the by – and now you don’t care and just want to eat.” Donnie closed his eyes and breathed loudly. “Fee Fie Fo Fum, Tabor smells the blood of an English-mun.”

Tabor rolled his eyes. “Man, don’t be that way. Listen, you want to keep talking, then we need to eat. It’s lunch time. I got blood sugar issues.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Where you wanna go?”

“Not hungry. Don’t care.”

Tabor waved a hand. “You gotta eat something. When’s the last time you ate?”

“Last night. Flix bars and boxed wine.”

“Oh, you a health nut, now.”

“Don’t mock me.”

Tabor started rattling off restaurants – local joints, chain places, fast food.

“Fast food,” Donnie said. He needed some grease to hold his body together.

“Where?”

“Burger King. I think I want Burger King.”

“The hell is Burger King?”

“What?”

“You deaf?” Tabor enunciated every word: “What. Is. Burger. King?”

Donnie felt his pulse quicken. He didn’t need this kind of nonsense. His head was fragile already, a Faberge egg held together with spit and masking tape. Tabor, his best friend – and without Tracy, his only friend – was turning against him, toying with his tender brainmeats.

“Shut up!” Donnie barked. “You damn well know what a, a, a Burger King is! It’s the place! Where the – the King of Burgers lives! Golden crown? Kind of a gay beard? Big smile? The BK Broiler? Jesus!” He pounded the dashboard with the flat of his hand to enunciate how little he wished to be messed with right now.

“You need to settle down, man. I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about, I am not making this up. Tell me. Is there a Burger King nearby?”

Teeth clenched. He was thisclose to screeching like an attacking raptor and pouncing on Tabor with beak and talon (or at least unbrushed teeth and sweaty palms). He sucked in a deep breath. “Burger King. Corner of Redstone and Spring Market. By the entrance ramp to the bypass.”

Tabor frowned. Waited. “Oooookay.”

“Okay what? What’s the frown for?”

“That’s not a Burger King.”

“It’s not a – well, then, what is it?”

“Man, that’s the Burrito Hut.”

<*>

“The Burrito Hut,” Donnie read the sign.

It’s what the sign said. A slim burrito arch – the giant tortilla dripping fake hot sauce, beans, meat chunks, and for some goddamn reason the giant tortilla had big googly eyes – framed the words.

It wasn’t new, either. The Hut looked weathered. Its purple walls were fading, pocked; someone had sprayed graffiti on the back dumpster. Place was busy, though. Cars lined up in the drive-thru. Parking lot at least half full, and through the glare on the outside window Donnie could see people agglomerating at the counter.

“This used to be a Burger King,” Donnie said. “Like, yesterday.”

Tabor blinked. Eyes narrowed to concerned slits.

“It’s been here forever, you say?” Donnie asked.

Tabor nodded. “Yeah, dude. I eat here all the time. Their Shimmy-Chimi is pretty much the best damn thing since cable television.”

“And you love Flix Bars.”

“You know it.”

“And you’ve never heard of a Burger King.”

Tabor held up his hands like a Vegas dealer, slapped them together as if to show that he wasn’t cheating. “Never, not once.”

“I gotta go,” Donnie said, suddenly.

“I gotta eat,” Tabor countered.

Abruptly, Donnie left the idling car and ran. Somewhere behind him, Tabor’s voice called after him, but it was lost, forgotten. He didn’t know where he was running, or even why, but there was the distinct feeling that something was both chasing him, and he was chasing something.

<*>

That night, Donnie found himself back at the motel room. His legs burned and itched from all the running. He hadn’t stopped running since he took off out of Tabor’s car, which was easily six hours ago. His robe was soaked with sweat. His sweat pants were soaked with sweat, too, though arguably that was their purpose, you know, hence the name.

He looked in the mirror of the bathroom, barely recognized himself.

Bloodshot eyes. Gaunt face. Mouth frozen in a slightly-horrified rictus.

He was seeing things, too. All during the run, he felt a presence behind him. His peripheral vision caught sight of something, too, like a shape running alongside of him, watching him from behind hedgerows and trashcans. The shadow wasn’t a big thing, no larger than a dog or a dwarf. A midget, maybe. Maybe he was being chased by a midget. A ninja midget. Shit. That didn’t make any sense.

His stomach growled.

“Shut up,” he told it.

He considered going back and filling his gut with more booze. A bottle of whiskey sat atop the television. He decided it would be a bad idea. A profoundly bad idea. He did it anyway.

Lips on bottle, hot Irish fire charbroiling his esophagus.

He pulled away from the bottle such a sucking foomp, and set it back atop the TV.

Then he noticed.

Jack Kenny Whiskey. Blue Label, it said.

Donnie blinked.

There was no such thing as Jack Kenny Whiskey.

And yet, here it was. He’d just had some. It wasn’t far from a trashcan filled with Flix Bar wrappers, and Flix Bar didn’t exist, either. And Burrito Hut, about five miles away. Goddamn Burrito Hut.

That’s where he’d go. Burrito Hut.

“But I just came from there,” Donnie explained to himself.

Didn’t matter. Here, he couldn’t ask any questions of a pile of Flix Bar wrappers or a neck-empty bottle of so-called Jack Kenny Whiskey. At Burrito Hut, though, he could get to the bottom of things. He could ask some questions. Find what they did with Burger King. Was it drugs? In the water supply? A conspiracy was afoot.

He took a few quick deep breaths, slapped his legs to get the blood moving, then broke into another crazy marathoner run out the door, back to Burrito Hut.

<*>

Public drunkenness, they called it.

Which wasn’t fair, not really. Donnie wasn’t drunk. Any of the lingering buzz from the not-really-real Jack Kenny Whiskey had long since faded when he ran through the front doors of the Burrito Hut.

The bars of the holding cell were surprisingly warm. The whole place, with its cement walls painted banana-colored, and its metal toilet, was actually pretty damn humid. Moisture glistened on the walls. When they threw him in here, alone, the one lady cop told him that the air conditioning was busted.

He took a deep breath. What he’d seen in the Burrito Hut, what he’d glimpsed –

Everything seemed normal, at first. Late lunchers, lining up at the counter. A pair of Hispanics in front of him, and in front of them, a little girl in a side-sprouting pony-tail with her mother busily thumbing numbers into her Blackberry (probably text messaging Flixy the Moon Alien, Donnie thought at the time, a thought that would later become alarming relevant). Manning the single-register counter was a rubicund, fat-cheeked teen with a purple paper hat.

Donnie didn’t know what he was expecting. He had no script. He felt sick inside. The fast food joint had felt constraining, like it was closing in on him.

He got to the counter, and let fly.

What he said, he didn’t precisely remember. Something about Flix Bars. Something about conspiracies. Maybe even something about Tracy. The smell that drifted from the kitchen was a mix of sharp spices and potted meat, a tangy (too tangy, really, to be appetizing) conglomeration of the two.

In mid-rant, that’s when he’d seen it.

Behind some kind of massive pressure-cooker – some stainless steel thing with a line of dried refried beans crusted to its side – Donnie saw movement.

It was a shimmering shape, unreal, a specter. Like those blurry shots of Bigfoot or any lake monster, the details were imperfect, almost incomprehensible. A swath of green flashed against a half-moon slice of purple. Movement like fly-wings buzzing, too fast, too strange. And then it was gone again, blinking out of existence. The cooker continued to bubble and steam.

Donnie freaked.

By his recollection, he did a lot of wild gesticulating.

Maaaaybe some yelling.

Not impossible that he said something about aliens, and then spit on the register.

Mistakes were made.

Worst of all, he hadn’t noticed the police officer that had come in soon after he did and was waiting two people behind him.

And now, here. Jail. Holding cell. Shit.

<*>

His one phone call, made to Tracy.

It was probably a mistake. He should’ve called Tabor. But while it was irrational, it felt like Tabor was part of whatever was happening. Tabor loved Flix Bars. Tabor couldn’t get enough of Burrito Hut. Tabor probably bathed in a swimming pool filled with warm Jack Kenny Whiskey.

Donnie asked Tracy to post bail.

“I don’t know, Donnie. It’s a lot of money.”

“You only need part of it. You could sell my old Monkees LPs. They’re worth something. The comic books, too. Even the toys! I’ve got a lot of toys.”

“I can’t see you right now, Donnie.”

“Tracy, please, I’m in jail.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Desperate gambit time. “I love you.”

“I know,” she said.

“That’s it? You know?”

“I have to go.”

“But – wait! Tell Tabor! He’ll help! Send Tabor!”

It was too late. She’d already hung up.

Behind the sound of the dial tone, Donnie thought he heard a baby crying.

And then they were pulling him away from the phone, and the sound was gone.

<*>

Things got weird around midnight.

Donnie was half-asleep on the cot in the cell’s corner, trying to shut out the light (the cops informed him that the lights never shut off, not even at night). He was caught in the throes of half-dreams to go with his half-sleep. Shadows of Tracy visited him, but every time she went to talk he heard a baby squalling somewhere and her words were lost. Something about how it was too late, too late, if only. Tabor the Giant came along with his squeaky white cart, except he was easily twice his normal size, and in these partial dreams he kept picking Donnie up and shoving him in the cart, murmuring something about a “mail call.” Sometimes, Donnie felt the taste of a Flix Bar in his mouth, or the burn of Jack Kenny Whiskey down his throat, or the sickly sweet scent of Grade-E-but-Edible Tex-Mex fiesta meat from the diabolical Burrito Hut. Other sensations visited him, too, ones he couldn’t explain: the nasal tang of an unknown perfume, tinny electro-pop music like which he’d never heard, the mysterious taste of a falafel (he was certain it was a falafel, though he’d never eaten, or frankly seen, a falafel before).

And then he saw them.

Moon Aliens, like Flixy.

Seven of them.

Except they weren’t cartoons – he caught a glimpse of pinched reptilian flesh, and white fangs stained with grape-colored smears – and they came at him, hands reaching, stubby fingers wagging in the humid jail cell heat, and they shimmered as if seen behind a gauzy haze of heat rising off a blistering highway–

And Donnie wondered when this dream would move on and give way toward something even stranger.

But the dream did not move on.

Green hands that smelled of metal and chocolate covered his face.

He tried to cry out.

The lights went out.

And that’s when things got really weird.

<*>

Lights coruscated all around him. Each flash felt like it cut straight to his cerebral cortex, burning an image into his brain.

He saw flying babies zip past him. Cherubic grins. Fat faces. Curious hands reaching for him as they zoomed by.

His guts felt like taffy.

And it felt like someone was trying to pull that gut-taffy out of his body through his mouth, ears, and anus.

Then – a pop sound, preceded by a faint sucking noise, like the one Donnie’s lips made when he pried them free of the Jack Kenny bottle.

All was dark, at least for a little while.

<*>

“Some people do not react well to change.”

Donnie lurched upright. His head swam, vision dipped.

The room was long, narrow, with walls of steel and a faint blue light suffused throughout. At the margins of the room, Donnie saw several of the Moon Aliens shuffling back and forth, grunting like piglets with slop in their mouths and noses. The Flixies chattered back and forth, sometimes clacking their empurpled teeth.

At the far end of the room – the end Donnie sat facing – was a pull-down screen. At the other end of the room blinked the winking eye of a projector.

Projected on the screen was an image Donnie couldn’t quite parse.

It seemed to be a generic gray and black 9-Volt battery with a pair of googly eyes, like the ones glued to a cheap arts-and-crafts doll. The fake eyes looked this way, and that.

“I’m on drugs,” Donnie whispered.

“You’re not on drugs,” the battery said. He knew the battery said it because with each word – each syllable, really – the battery pulsed with white light.

“You’re a battery.”

“I am merely an image you would understand. Were I to show you my true form, your human mind would explode into a thousand personalities and leave you wailing in a pile of your own fetid mess.”
Gently, Donnie stood.

“I’ve lost my mind,” he said.

“You’ve not lost your mind,” the battery asserted.

The Flixies chuffed and snorted in what might have been agreement.

One of them casually ate what appeared to be a chimichanga. Another displayed its beckoning jazz hands.

“That’s a chimichanga,” Donnie said, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” the battery confirmed.

The room was silent for a little while, except for the snorfling breathing of the two dozen or so Flixies shifting from one stubby green foot to another.

Swallowing hard, Donnie said: “A little help here? If I’m not high, and I’m not crazy, then –?”

“As I said, some people do not react well to change. These people – like you — are the ones who cannot properly compute the dimensional shifts.”

“Dimensional shifts.”

“Yes,” the battery said. “The subtle alterations to the fabric of your reality are performed through delicate dimensional shifts. Ninety-nine percent of people accept these changes without thought or concern.”

“And I’m part of the one percent?”

“Yes.”

Silence again as Donnie regarded the googly-eyed battery. The battery may have regarded him in return, but it was hard to tell, what with the googly-eyes and all.

Suddenly, Donnie snapped his fingers. “Flix Bars! I bet they’re part of the subtle alterations of dimensional, you know, whatever. Right?”

“Yes. Flix Bars, Burrito Hut, Jack Kenny Whiskey, Ganymede Electronics, Vaginex Creams, Lung Sui-Wu Cookery Sets, Cowboy Tom’s Microwave Falaf –“

“Okay, okay, you can stop. All those products are now in our dimension? And they weren’t before?”

“Yes, but not just your dimension. We established a product roll-out covering four hundred Earth-based dimensions, as pioneered by the Perigree Corporation, which is owned by the Jimza Conglomerate, which is owned by the Meiner-Schiften People, which is owned by –“

“All right!” Donnie barked. “This is a little much for me to handle.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Why are these products now in our dimension?”

“Money. More dimensions means more sales. More sales, higher stock.”

“I’d like to just go home, now,” Donnie said, and it was true. He didn’t feel well. He was dressed in a robe in some alien ship or dimensional box, and he really didn’t belong here. He said as much to the battery.

“No,” the battery pulsed. “I’m afraid we have to destroy you.”

“But –!”

“What we’re doing goes against the Quantum Code as established by Earth Seven in the Year of the Dragon, 1976. We cannot have you blowing the whistle.”

Movement to his left and right. The Flixies shuffled cautiously toward him, purple-smear teeth glowing weirdly in the bluish light. Some of them held knives that could’ve doubled as Satanic gynecological equipment.

“But – why? Why did you even bother to bring me here?”

“All sentient creatures deserve knowledge.”

“But by telling me this, that means you have to kill me!”

“Yes. Knowledge has its price.”

The Flixies pounced. Hands grabbed at him and dragged him down. Teeth clacked and chomped at one another; some kind of mad language. He saw the glint of a blade moving toward his heart.

“Wait!” he cried. “Let’s make a deal! Please!”

The Flixies stopped, as if hearing an unspoken cue.

“You can offer us nothing,” the battery declared.

“No,” Donnie stammered, “but you can offer me something.”

“I do not understand.”

“If you grant me a favor, then you’ve got me on the hook. Suddenly, I’m in your pocket! I won’t tell anybody anything if I’m in your pocket! That way, you don’t have to destroy me! Killing me is probably illegal, too, right? Some, uh, Quantum Code violation?”

The battery seemed to think about this.

The googly-eyes narrowed.

“Yes. It is a violation.”

“It can be a mutual pact. A deal. I’ll keep quiet. Just help me with one thing.”

“Tell me this thing,” the battery demanded.

So Donnie told him.

<*>

The baby cried. The sound was joyous.

Slick with goo and red as a sliced beet, the little tow-head wriggled and sobbed and clenched his corn-sized toes.

Tracy looked spent, utterly so, but her face was beaming nevertheless. A nurse swabbed sweat from her glistening brow. Outside the window of the hospital room, Tabor’s big shape and shadow could be seen dutifully pacing, the task of a good friend.

The presence of his new son was going to be a big change. It’d require real responsibility. Donnie knew he was wearing the Big Boy Pants – the Daddy Pants – now, and that nothing would ever be the same.

But he was ready for the change.

The talking battery be damned.

Of course, the deal had some complications. Tracy had already had an abortion in this dimension, the battery explained. The baby was gone. To comply with Donnie’s request, they had to pluck another Tracy – the most similar Tracy they could find – from another Earth and, well, trade the two of them. It was fine. The battery told him that neither Tracy would know. Both would be happy in both continuums, whatever a ‘continuum’ was.

The nurse gave Tracy the baby. The doctor handed off the umbilicus.

Once in Tracy’s embrace, their son stopped crying and seemed to settle into a kind of happy gurgling.

Donnie leaned in and stroked her brow.

“What do you want to name him?” he asked Tracy.

She thought about it for a moment as a single happy tear rolled down her cheek.

“Flixy,” she said, finally.

Donnie started to laugh, it was funny, though uncomfortable-funny, but then he saw a faint shimmer around his new son, and the pink babyflesh became for a moment a strange hue of Iguana green, and he saw a flash of purple teeth reaching for Tracy’s breast beneath the sheet. Then the shimmer extended upwards to Tracy, too, and he saw her smeared teeth and green skin as she smiled.

Then it was gone. The haze dissipated, and his wife and son were back again.

A little voice in his head told him to run, run. Break into a hard run and never come back.

But he suppressed it.

“I like change,” he croaked. He shuddered. “Change is good.”

At least they gave him that lifetime supply of Flix Bars.

Drawing a deep breath, he reached toward Tracy and their new son, Flixy.

© Chuck Wendig 2009

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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