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

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

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

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

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

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

She is happy with the contrast.

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

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

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

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

ditdit

— I sexxed last night.

ditdit

— Oh. Tell us the juicy details!

— Boy or girl? Boy or girl?

— I like the Jade AI. She’s so… real.

— Boy.

ditdit

— Oh! Where did you meet him?

— Did you get some new kit?

— How many times did you orgasm?

Ditditditditditditditdit

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

— I dumped my boyfriend yesterday.

ditditditditditditditdit

— Aw, that’s bad news.

ditdit

— It was the right thing to do.

— Five times! Personal best!

— Come out with us tonight.

ditdit

— Ooh! What wares are you using?

— Come out with us tonight.

— SexXbox 6.

ditdit

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

— I should have done it ages ago.

— Karl got evicted! It should have been Jorja.

ditdit

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

ditdit

— Aw, no. That bastard

— That Brian can still dance.

— I sexxed last night.

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

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

Second-last.

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

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

— That was awesome.

— You were hott.

— Did you see the bloke Jaxx pulled?

— That was awesome.

— That was hott.

— I did! He was hott!

— So awesome.

— Did you see the bloke Jaxx pulled?

— He was hott.

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

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

She chose the venue.

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

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

— So what happened?

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

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

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

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

— What?

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

— Oh.

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

Alis looks blank.

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

— Do you want to sexx with me?

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

— Sorry. What?

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

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

— There’s no need to apologise.

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

— But you do.

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

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

— What?

— I have some awesome new —

— You’re not offended?

— Why would I be offended?

— I thought —

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

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

— I don’t know what to —

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

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

— Let’s go.

Pressure.

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

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

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

ditdit

She straightens, looks ahead.

— What was that?

— An alert. The office. Things to do.

— Um. I can go home instead —

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

— Oh.

I hope you have enjoyed me.

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

— Take your coat off. Hooks are there.

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

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

She takes his hand.

— This way.

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

She hands him a condom.

— Please use this.

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

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

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

She gives control of her body to the system.

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

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

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

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

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

— I, um. That was —

— The shower is through to the left.

She motions, smiling like an in-flight attendant.

— Oh. Thanks.

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

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

— Oh, I thought —

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

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

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

Everything is blue, and stays that way.

© HD Ingham 2009

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

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

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

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

She accesses the entry and highlights > Call.

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

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

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

She says out loud,

— What’s to lose?

She calls him.

Five rings.

— Hello?

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

He laughs, once.

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

He pauses, says,

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

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

He pauses.

— I thought you just said you were called Alice.

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

The sound of something dawning.

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

— Oh.

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

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

— I just split up with someone too.

He goes quiet again.

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

— Yes!

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

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

They pause again. He says:

— Are you at work today?

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

He takes a breath and adds:

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

— Good.

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

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

— Sarah is fine.

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

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

It’s the best she’s going to get.

She’s been saving.

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

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

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

— Oh, hey, Unis. How’s it—

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

— Sit down, please.

Unis motions towards the chair nearest the door.

— Um. OK. So what’s up?

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

— Hold still, please.

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

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

bdeet

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

— Allow it access, please, says Unis.

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

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

Sarah takes a deep breath.

— Start counting, please.

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

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

— Ninety-seven.

— That was quick, says the man.

— Ninety-seven.

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

— Ninety-seven.

— What are we doing? says the man.

— Ninety-seven.

— OK.

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

— Ninety-seven.

— Ninety-seven.

The man looks at the statement and whistles.

— She’s been saving.

Unis straightens, smooths down her skirt.

— Ninety-seven.

— Ninety-seven.

Unis looks back at Sarah.

— Ninety-seven.

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

The man clicks the mouse button.

— Nigh.

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

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

— Debit. She has the funds. Inventory?

— Bit of unlicensed ware.

Unis doesn’t blink.

— Oh? What does she have?

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

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

— No. Delete it.

— OK.

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

— She doesn’t have any recreational wares?

— Nope. Not a thing.

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

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

— Sure.

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

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

— All wiped. Clean as a whistle.

— Restart her.

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

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

Alis smiles.

— I feel awesome.

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

— Your archive.

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

— Um. Thank you.

Unis looks over her shoulder.

— Ross?

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

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

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

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

— Enjoy yourself. Have some you time.

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

© HD Ingham 2009

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

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

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

— Cancel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he says to her,

— You need to talk.

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

— I really don’t remember —

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

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

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

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

He smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doorbell wakes her up.

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

It’s Simon.

— You’ve got a key, she says.

— I couldn’t find it.

He looks her down.

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

— I overslept.

He opens his mouth, closes it, says,

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

— I ignored it. I just wanted to sleep.

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

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

He puts his hand to his forehead.

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

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

— I’m not coming.

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

— I’m not coming.

— Why?

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

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

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

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

He opens his mouth.

— Alis—

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

— Is this about Tuesday?

— Yes.

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

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

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

Simon is staring at her.

— I—

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

— Now hang on—

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

— That’s not fair.

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

— That’s not fair, Alis.

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

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

— It was better than not having anyone at all.

— So what changed?

She pauses. But she does not move her arm.

— I decided that it wasn’t enough.

— Alis—

— Do you remember how we met?

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

— Why?

— I fancied you.

— Why?

— Because I did, and I’d never—

He stops.

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

He looks away.

— That’s not fair.

— You keep saying that.

He stares at her, his lips pressed tightly together.

— Alis, he says, I have never—

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

— That’s not—

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

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

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

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

— Get yourself another sex doll, asshole.

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

— You won’t find anyone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then again: it hurts.

© HD Ingham 2009

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

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

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

— Prepped.

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

— Very good, thank you.

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

— There’s nothing here. Sew her up.

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

Lost in blue.

Smiling, vacantly.

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

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

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

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

She can’t face today, she thinks.

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

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

— Sarah?

The voice speaks again.

— Excuse me? Sarah? Sarah Ogilvy?

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

— I’m terribly sorry. Do I know you?

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

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

— Pause. Insert statement.

> Successful_

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

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

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

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

— So. How’s Nick doing these days?

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

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

— Oh. I’m sorry.

He pauses for three seconds.

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

— but you’re, ah —

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

— You’re looking well.

And she click beams again, says,

— Thank you.

He nods, presses his lips together.

— How long have you —

He stalls; she looks at him without blinking.

— I mean, how long have you had the —

He taps his temple with a finger.

— The implant?

— Yeah.

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

— Three years, Four months.

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

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

She click blinks click tilts her head click smiles.

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

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

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

— Sarah?

She looks up, beaming.

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

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

— That would be nice. Thank you.

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

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

> Saved_

The train pulls into Green Park. Jon looks up.

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

— Goodbye.

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

He liked it better that way.

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

It’s Simon.

— lookin 4wrd 2 2moro

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

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

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

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

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

> Are you sure? (OK/Cancel)_

— Cancel.

She texts Simon.

— sorry didnt get up weds

That’s it, then.

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

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

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

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

She transmits:

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

> Invalid command. Retry?_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drowned out.

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

— Your father, then, says her mother.

Sarah knows the script.

— Tell me about him.

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

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

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

She goes with the script.

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

— I should. I need to.

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

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

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

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

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

— I couldn’t ever be disappointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah turns away.

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

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

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

Sarah’s mother smiles.

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

Sarah joins in:

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

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

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

bdeet

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

> Cache cleanup?_

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

— Cancel. Save.

Speed is of the essence.

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

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

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

— No. No, no, no.

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

She used to fidget.

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

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

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

It’s 2307.

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

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

And he’s there.

He leans over and talks loudly into her ear.

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

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

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

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

— Oh.

He scratches the back of his head.

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

He pauses, tries again:

— I haven’t seen you here before.

— No.

She smiles.

— Can I buy you a drink?

— I’ve got one.

— Oh.

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

— Do you come here a lot?

— Yeah.

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

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

— No, she says out loud.

— What? says the boy.

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

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

— No.

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

— Don’t!

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

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

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

She forces herself to calm down.

— Cancel.

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

— I was, ah — she points to her port.

— Yeah.

She tries to smile.

— You can still buy me that drink.

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

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

— I don’t think so.

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

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

— I want to have sex tonight.

— I have to get back.

He backs off slightly, is looking away.

— I have software—

— It was nice meeting you.

And he’s gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Are you all right?

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

There are two flaws in the projection:

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

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

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

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

The alcohol isn’t having any effect.

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

The alcohol isn’t having any effect.

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

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

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

He is watching her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the warmth —

But she should just let it happen —

But it’s not human —

But she isn’t —

But there is no tenderness —

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

But —

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

She downs her drink and stands.

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

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

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— God, what a chore.

> Invalid command. Retry?_

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

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

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

— Oh, all right, then. Anything once.

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

And bdeet the processor says

> Mass storage device detected_

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

— Continue.

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

— OK.

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

And bdeet

> Your software has now been installed_

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

— Hey. Working late?

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

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

He nods. He doesn’t.

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

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

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

— I had a bad day.

— Mm? Is that what that text was about?

— Yeah.

She puts her fork down.

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

— Ah. Right.

She starts eating again,

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

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

He needs it. He always seems to need—

— Are you still up for it?

She doesn’t answer, stares over his shoulder.

— Alis?

She comes back to him.

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

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

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

She smiles, tightly.

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

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

She wishes he’d use her name.

We run on language.

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

Consider Sarah’s plight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To call her—

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

Call her—

(Nearly there.)

Call her Sarah.

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

They retire to the bedroom.

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

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

— Oh, sod it, she thinks.

She transmits:

— Run b:\Programs\NuCouplePro7_0.exe

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

bdeet

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

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

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

She does not dream.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

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

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

— Speak of the Devil, she says.

It’s a message from Unis.

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

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

— Can I go through with this?

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

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

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

And she slips into the real world,

Then she texts Simon.

> tonite as usual?

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

> yeh. evrything ok?

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

> ?

> do u thnk ppl rly have souls?

> no. why?

> no rsn. 2030 thn.

> <3 u.

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

It’s a funny thing, memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny thing, memory.

The door slides back, screaming.

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

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

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

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

> u on ur way?

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

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

It doesn’t seem to bother her.

— Hey, says Unis.

— Hey.

— How are we playing this?

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

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

— OK.

Unis leans back against the lock-up door.

— You still want—?

Sarah bites her lip.

— Yeah.

— You secure?

Sarah transmits:

— Privacy.

— Am now, she says.

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

— Hundred and seventy-five. Cash.

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

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

— OK.

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

— Shall we?

Unis holds up the key.

— Lets.

The door slides back, screaming.

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

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

— I’ll Photoshop it later.

Unis waits at the door.

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

— What’s happening this afternoon?

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

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

— Thanks. Here, catch.

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

— Oops, says Unis. Sorry.

— It’s OK.

— Laters, hottie, says Unis.

— Good luck with the new post.

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

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

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

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

>Item one.

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

> Item two.

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

> Item three.

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

> Item four.

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

> Item five.

A small bottle of reddish-brown ink.

And now the shelf above that:

> Item one.

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

> Item two.

A glass eye, brown.

> Item three.

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

> Item four.

A violin, strung with what looks like human hair.

> Item five.

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

> Items six through thirteen.

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

6. A nursery rhyme collection.

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

8. A paperback edition of Goethe’s Faust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Item one.

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

The sweater has a small bloodstain over the right breast.

>Item two.

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

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

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

— I think that’s enough for today.

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

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

— Hm. They’re pretty good, actually.

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

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

She’s human again, until dinner at least.

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

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

At 17.33, the cursor blinks.

> No items in queue?_

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

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks next Monday.

Sarah arrives at the office at 0851.

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

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

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

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

Thirty-two stories; six publications.

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

> No items in queue_

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

It’s 0925.

It’s 0939.

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

— Alis?

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

Tara taps her temple, twice.

— Assignment. Secure line, please.

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

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

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

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

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

She decides to do something different, says,

— Hi.

— Oh. Hi.

— How- How are you?

— Fine. Yeah.

He pauses, says:

— So.

She smiles.

— So.

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

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

— I’ve been here nine months.

— Oh. What department do you work in?

— Editorial and Reportage. Same as you.

— But not on the third floor, right?

— Post Thirteen. Three chairs along from you.

— Oh.

Silence falls, like someone switched the conversation to mute.

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

— Excuse me, do you mind-?

She shrugs.

— Not at all.

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

— Charming.

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

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

— Disable Invisibility Drive.

> Invalid command. No such device. Retry?_

She sighs, says out loud to no one,

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

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

He slips into the present tense.

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

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

She exits focus mode.

— No. That doesn’t sound right.

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

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

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

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

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

— Yes, yes. I’ll call him now.

— Excuse me. Where are the washrooms?

The receptionist motions with her head.

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

Makeup repair accomplished, Sarah heads for the restaurant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Nice piece of kit.

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

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

Grimslade settles in his chair.

— Can I order you a drink?

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

— What?

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

— Your schedule.

— Ah. Yes, yes.

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

— We’ll start.

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

— Why are you—?

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

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

Grimslade nods.

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

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

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

He slips into the present tense.

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

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

He waves his hand at her.

— Like you.

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

He sets out to prove it.

His interviewer transmits to her processor:

— Pause. Insert question.

> Successful_

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

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

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

— What would you know?

— My apologies. Please continue.

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

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

The interviewing asset inserts another question.

— How did you know?

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

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

So he decides to experiment on living subjects.

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

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

She dies.

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

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

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

They send him on holiday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He comes out his reverie, turns to his interviewer.

— You see? I was observing the data.

Powered by artificial bonhomie she click smiles click, says,

— Please go on.

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

— No offence.

click smile click

— None taken.

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

— The systems weren’t as secure back then.

— Please, explain.

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

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

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

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

— So what happened next, Mr. Grimslade?

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

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

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

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

And now she has barely a week to live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Please, more information.

— Why bother?

— Please, more information.

— It doesn’t matter any more.

— Please, more information.

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

— End Process.

> Process incomplete. Please re-enter information and retry_

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

— Please, more information.

The old man sighs.

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

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

— Please explain.

He leers at her again.

— Why?

— Your story is incomplete. Please explain.

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

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

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

— And?

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

Jeremiah sinks back into his chair.

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

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

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

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

— Hey Alis.

— Hey, everyone. How’s it going?

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

— Hey Alis.

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

— Did you see the Jade AI they brought in?

ditdit

— Hey Alis.

ditdit

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

— Hey Alis.

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

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

— I sexxed last night.

— Hey Alis.

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

ditdit

— Oh! Tell us the juicy details!

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

ditdit

— Oh! Was it a boy or a girl?

ditdit

— Next Thursday I think.

— Oh! Where did you meet her?

— Oh! How many times did you orgasm?

ditdit

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

— Oh! What software did you use?

— Oh! Was it good?

— I sexxed last night.

ditdit

ditdit

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

© HD Ingham 2009

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

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

The boy in the next seat nudges her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—hows the job?

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

—fab. u graduated now?

—yeh

—hungover + busy. can i call u l8r?

—ok <3 u

—<3 u 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The notice board. Deleted.

• The plasma-screen TV/DVD. Deleted.

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

• The duvet, plain green. Deleted.

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

• The bookshelf.

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

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

Her mother is sitting on the white IKEA sofa.

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

— Why couldn’t you have found someone?

A freeze.

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

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

Mum strokes the little girl’s hair.

— Yes?

— I want a dad, Mum.

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

— No, no. That wasn’t it. I love you.

Freeze.

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

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

She starts to speak.

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

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

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

Mum freezes out, and then she is gone.

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

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

> cache clean-up? _

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

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

— Backup.

> insert media_

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

— Move.

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

> cache clean-up? _

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

— OK.

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

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

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

Time to go.

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

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

© HD Ingham 2009

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

They were remixers—hot young things living off the pop cred of turning data into apps—and I worked for robots. They wore threadbare T-shirts under designer-distressed sports jackets, both boys and girls. I was surprised they even talked to me.

I’d been wearing that same striped button-down shirt for probably five years. My tie hung dead from my neck like a rabbit by its ankles. Only reason I wore it was so I’d feel like I was at work.

We ended up in the same bars, a little late for the after-work crowds, in what I sensed was the middle of their day. These were tinted-glass places, hotel bars with internet feeds in the tables, where the dim light kept everything at the same nebulous hour all the time, and only the occasional cable news feed on the monitors gave you any sense of time. Since all the TV streamed onto the tabletops and the windows from online, you couldn’t keep time by the TV schedule, either.

They always seemed to celebrating, having a drinking lunch, in high spirits because they were young and their jobs were fun. I was young, too, I thought. Late twenties. But I wasn’t having such a good time.

I knew enough to be on the hipster-programmer bar circuit, at least. Knew where to hang out in the hopes that some kind of decent job would rub off on me. That I’d catch one like a cold.

A lot of the crews that came in were game developers, sassy and foul-mouthed and turning everything into a joke. Tax breaks and promises of new city-wide fiber optics had lured slices of companies in from Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin and Iceland. Parent companies shipped them here, to shitty weather and good times, like it was college. Except they were all making sick amounts of money instead of racking up student loans.

All they did was work and spend money. Jackets from Britain. Sunglasses from Italy. Phones from Japan. They smelled expensive and some of them had accents.

Looking at my reflection in the tranquilly animated oceanscape of the bar’s interface, I didn’t think I looked so different from them. From the neck up I looked like one of them, soft-haired, disheveled and unshaven. But my hair just dried that way. So I wasn’t doing it right.

Rain threw spots of water at the tinted windows. Little animated droplets dripped across the bar’s countertop interface like sweat running down a cold beer. A Budweiser logo materialized. “Click here for refreshment,” it read. I pinned the logo with one finger and side-armed it down the bar. It slid to a stop in front of an empty stool and waited, sweating.

I scrolled through cheap scotch options, double-tapped some Canadian whiskey, and when I looked up she was there. Rebekah. One of the remixers that worked on the other side of the skywalk, in the big glass needle across the street. Her straight blond hair fell into a tangle at the collar of her sports jacket. In profile, all I could see past her hair was the tip of her nose, an elfin button at the end of a long slope.

Near as I could tell, she was the arty one; the one who knew theater and literature. I don’t know shit about theater or literature, but I know enough about movies and books to find theater and literature attractive in someone else. She leaned into arguments about subtext and symbolism in a way that was so hot.

The loading graphic on her credit card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon dude from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, capped it off with a flourish, and held up a sign that said “Approved!”

“Hey, Bekah,” I said.

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked over. “Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. How’re you doing?”

I nodded. “Oh, you know.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

She pulled down a menu on the bar’s interface and poked around for a while before settling on a Belgian beer with a long name. She tapped the menu once with the corner of her credit card. The little loading graphic on her card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, then capped it off with a flourish and a sign that said “Approved!”

We sat there while the bartender eyeballed his monitor and dug around in the back of the fridge for her weird beer. We sat there while he dropped off our drinks. We sat there, watching television in two different directions.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“It’s good. Busy. You know.” She turned to look at me. “What do you do again?”

“I’m a leader,” I said. “For robots. Scrapers. You know.”

She smiled. “Harvesters.”

“They’re harvesters or ‘importers’ when you’ve got a nice firm and a respectable application. Contractors like me and the spiders I work for? Are scrapers.”

She smiled and nodded, turning back to the plasma screen.

Leader. It sounded so much better than it was. I was a leader the way a bloodhound leads a sheriff: on a leash.

My sheriff was some remote investor in Beijing. His deputies—my bosses—were off-the-shelf internet robots, commercial-grade information scavengers, but ordinary mass-market software troopers all the same. Get together enough start-up money and you could buy the software robots, the servers, and a top-speed Internet connection in China, then double-click the software and be mining data inside of a week. A month after that and you’ve probably got enough email addresses and phone numbers to sell that you’ve recouped your investment. Every month after that is profit.

She turned back to me. “Do you like it?”

“It’s easy,” I said. “The hours are good.” We nodded again, glanced at our televisions. “But no. Not really.”

© 2008 Will Hindmarch