“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.

“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot—not, not—love you,” she said again.

Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”

The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle today,” he said, taking the record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the new record.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said.

“Good morning, my love.”

“And you still want to keep it?” Kendal’s got him by the wrist joint, one foot on his thigh, and she’s pulling.

“That’s not,” his voice breaks into a shriek as his elbow port disconnects, “funny!” He’s panting. Something drips out of the joint. A bit of conductor fluid, a dab of blood.

“The worm’s in your wrist now, for sure. You’re about ten seconds from losing your shoulder. You want I should wait?”

“No,” he says. “Yes. Wait.” He looks at the ceiling. Yellow tiles, used to be white. He swore he’d never let her do this again. He smells the electric burn of his elbow grinding itself, out of place. If the virus gets into his myokinetic interface, into the flat ribbons under his shoulder muscles, leading to his spine, it could mess with the signals that run from brain to arm in a game of bioelectric telephone. Permanent damage.

And yet.

“Don’t do it,” he says. Almost crying.

“Screw that,” Kendal says, leaning back into it, pushing off his thigh until his arm’s off its threads.

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.

Author’s Note: “This odd thing is a fake middle chapter to an imaginary novel. Artist Kevin Dart created the cover to a novel of his own invention — Stealing Candy From Babies — and I found it (and more of his work) so inspiring that, as an exercise, I decided to try writing a chapter of the book. Here I attempt a style of fiction and language befitting the style and, I hope, quality of the cover. You tell me if I hit any of the targets.

“Go look at Kevin’s art and his upcoming, incredible-looking classic-spy book. (And Fleet Street Scandal, too). His work evokes wonderful stories.”

Illustration © Kevin Dart

He stopped the car at a motel and diner, just over an hour up the road. She knew what that meant.

The lights of the parking lot revealed his face in the night through momentary flashes and bands of color. A stripe of white light from the diner windows showed his face expressionless and robotic, his eyes scanning and alert. A band of red light from the motel’s neon revealed him trying to hold back a smirk, the dash throwing devilish shadows from his eyebrows across his high forehead. In the yellow glow of the motel’s walkway lamps, his expression went back to neutral and he put the car in park.

“Here we are,” he said, almost cheery.

Candace got out of the car, pausing upright between her open door and the El Camino’s cockpit. She turned away from the motel and looked out into the night. A stretch of black and broken asphalt, dead parking spaces marked by the ghosts of white lines, yawned between them and the tall lights of the highway. Beyond the lanes of the rugged, crumbling highway was a wall of green corn, taller than she was, and then the rest of the state, running off into the night, all the way to the line.

She looked at him. He idly shut his car door while staring across to the diner.

The diner — a wannabe Waffle House — lay far off to one side, bright in the dark but muffled and distant, like a hot aquarium filled with smoke. It bubbled with the faint beat of the Big Bopper. The way there was either across the parking lot or along the roofed sidewalk that connected it to the motel. There was something like an empty corner lot between them, with a chain-link fence and a few concrete steps suggesting that a building stood there once, but had died.

Candace shifted her focus and found him looking at her, eyes narrow. He was yellow on one side, from the walkway lights, and shadow on the other. She shut her passenger-side door and, on the cue of the slam, smiled.That was a moment. She could’ve run right then, she thought.

That was a moment. She could’ve run right then, she thought.

“Come on,” he said, pointing with his bald spot.

He walked towards her, past her, heading away from the diner. As he passed, she felt the diamond hard against her skin, safe in its hiding place for now.

She tensed herself, ready to push off the asphalt and sprint around the car, for the diner, when she noticed another car — Colin’s Mustang. Even in the dismal light it was bright red and bright white, dirtied only around the edges with the dust of the road.

But… what was Colin doing here? How did he beat them here if—

“Come on, silly” the balding man said. She was more sure by the moment that his name was not Scott.

He walked right past the motel clerk’s door.

Candace, following him, slowed and pointed a thumb as she passed the door. “Shouldn’t we—?”

“Nope,” he said. He waggled a flat plastic diamond keychain next to his ear. “I’m way ahead of you.” He stopped and turned. He looked impatient.

She held her purse before her in both hands and hurried forward, exaggerating her steps in her high heels. Each step clopped a heel onto the sidewalk. She wanted guests to know there were people outside their rooms. She ran the risk that one of them was Colin, but if she knew him he was in the diner with Joe Camel.

As she approached, he turned and unlocked the door to a room just three or four in from the end of the walkway and the edge of the weedy darkness. He swung open the door and flipped on the light. Through the door she saw yellowing wallpaper and crusted carpet.

As she smiled and stepped forward, she ran options through in her mind. But if she ran now, things would escalate. He might chase her. He might yell, or she might yell, and then Colin would appear and she’d be back where she started, between him and the diamond. And if Scott had a gun — which seemed likely for someone who picked up hitchhikers and had a motel room ready — he might just shoot her instead of chase her.

No, as long as she kept him on the hook, she could control the tenor and the tempo. She knew how to keep a man hovering between lust and action. She let one red strap slip off her shoulder as she walked forward, into the motel room.

“Welcome to my humble… lair,” he said, tripping over the last word, clearly hearing the creepiness in it. He tried to cover it with a chuckle, a shrug, and a headshake. His eyes didn’t smile.

A moth puttered against the light above them.

“You were prepared,” she said, trying to sound relieved and stupid. But if he saw it as a challenge, that would tell her something at least: that he was wary of her suspicion. He gave off no signal she could read, though. She walked into the room, lifting the strap back onto her shoulder. “I’m, uh, glad I don’t have to spend all night in the car.”

“You sure don’t,” he said. He shut the door and fixed the chain.

“How’d you have this ready already?”

“I was just driving around listening to the radio. I got this room this afternoon.”

The place was cramped and orange, with an orange bathroom off the empty closet. Dark brown furniture held up dingy lamps, which cast parabolas of light onto canvases splotched with paint that loosely described flowers in vases. The walls and ceiling had worn-down gold-colored textures and patterns on them. The place was humid and warm like an armpit. At least three pairs of socks were wadded on top of an open suitcase, with a pair of pants sprawled on the floor beneath. The room smelled like those socks.

He’d been here longer than one afternoon.

“I’m lucky you came by, then,” she said.

“I think,” he said, “I’m the lucky one.”

Maybe all he wanted was carnal, and all she’d have to do was navigate his fantasy romance routineShe looked over her shoulder at him. His head was tipped down in a predatory gaze, exposing his bald spot, but his face had a fake-casual smile. He thought he was being charming — she recognized that easily enough — but he hadn’t ever seen himself in action and didn’t have the self-awareness to realize the vibe he gave off.

Maybe, she hoped, maybe he really was just some garden-variety dirty creep who picked up what he thought was a lonely hitchhiker. Maybe all he wanted was carnal, and all she’d have to do was navigate his fantasy romance routine until he fell asleep.

“Mind if I pop in the washroom? I’d like to freshen up,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said.

She moved toward the bathroom.

“You can leave your things here,” he said, hand out.

She looked confused, then scared, then hated herself for it. “My—?”

“Your purse or shoes. The faucet leaks. Counter gets all wet. Don’t want you to—”

“Oh!” She handed him her purse. “Thank you.”

He took it and leaned over to set it on the nightstand. This raised his polo shirt enough for her to see the black plastic grip of a pistol in his jeans, behind his back.
She stepped into the bathroom and smiled at him through the opening as she slowly shut the door. Then she locked it. Then she snapped a towel off the rod, whipped it into a fat rope, and tied the doorknob to the towel rod. If she was lucky, it would hold against one extra shove or flap off after a good kick and add to the chaos when he stormed in. If she was unlucky, the towel rod would snap off and hit her if he broke the door down.

Stop. Think.

He had a gun, which meant he wasn’t just a creep looking for a bounce off a lucky lonely hitcher. If this was bad luck, he was something rougher and maybe more crazed. If this wasn’t bad luck, it meant her father had hired men to come after her. After the diamond, really.

Which was probably the case — he took her purse and wanted her shoes. Maybe he thought she’d keep the diamond in her purse, of all places. Or her shoes. Right now, “Scott” was looking through that purse and feeling frustrated. Frustrated and armed. She imaged him pulling a bottle of gin from the nightstand drawer when she heard something sloshing in a bottle through the door.

But she still had her shoes. She slipped them off and felt her weight fall across both her feet, posed wide on the warm tile floor.

She looked in the mirror. Her hair, now more dirty than blonde, clung to her sweaty skin in dark but shiny strands. She adjusted her bustier. She gripped her red cocktail dress by the hem beneath her breasts, swiveled it up and then tugged it tight. The diamond between her breasts didn’t show. Maybe she could distract him with her cleavage long enough…

Long enough. For what?

Now she’d trapped herself in an orange, windowless bathroom with a mercenary and a gun between her and the hot Oklahoma night. And Colin was out there, and it seemed sure that if there was trouble, he’d be drawn like a moth, and double that trouble. Was there any way out of here that wouldn’t find that gunman’s hands on her body, or her body back in Colin’s car again?

The floor creaked outside the bathroom. The towel blocked the keyhole.

She twisted the creaky knobs in the shower. Water dribbled, then rained down.

“I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said, her voice free of fear or doubt. “It’s so hot tonight.”

An awful pause. “Yeah,” he said. “All right.” He wasn’t as happy as the idea of her getting naked should’ve made him.

She got opposite the door and wedged herself into a spot next to the toilet. She dropped one shoe onto the floor between her and the door. She gripped the other one tight in her right hand, fingers clenching the open toe, heel jutting out above her thumb.

The door shifted. She heard his weight shift and press against it. She heard the knob rattle against its lock. On the other side of the door, he sighed. On this side, she waited.

Minutes passed. Her toes ached, so she put her weight flat onto her feet. She had to stay taught to stay between the toilet and the corner. The time she could believably spend in the shower came and went.

He came back to the door. Rattled it again. She took that to mean he wasn’t quite up for what he—

The door shook against one firm blow. The lock popped. The second kick broke the towel rod free of its mount and sent it clattering off the toilet and then back toward the door. It his Scott in the legs somewhere and he skidded to a halt to get his bearings amid the noise and spinning metal.

As he did, she bounded forward on one foot and swung her high heel against his temple. He crumpled onto hands and knees. She got her balance and dashed past him.

He groped for her dress, got a handful of it behind her legs and tore a shred out of the skirt. It pulled tight as it tore, pinning her legs and sending or onto the carpet on her elbows and chin. Her shoe clattered under the bed.

She was halfway from the bathroom to the door already, with the bed mostly in her way. She went over it, toward the nightstand.

He started to yell at her, to get her to slow down. “It’s not there, you—” She grabbed what turned out to be a bottle of Jack and swung back around with it, aiming at his opposite temple.

For a single white-hot second she was brilliantly visible, her shadow huge and sharp on the wall…He stopped her with his forearm against he wrist. She flicked the bottle down against his skull with a weak clop. She saw now the blood oozing down his temple, across his cheekbone, into his eye. He put his weight forward, knocking her onto the nightstand. She was bent over backwards, her pelvis and torn skirt out, her shoulders back. She cried out.

His weight was on her. She was afraid her back might break. He fought the bottle free of her grip and tossed it at the closet. In that moment, she hoisted her knee into his crotch — the oldest trick in the book — and he was ready for it. He scuttled back off the glancing hit.

He went for his gun behind his back.

She reached over her shoulder and plucked the lamp from the nightstand.

It was a shiny silver snub-nose.

She swung the lamp overhand, upside-down.

For a single white-hot second she was brilliantly visible, her shadow huge and sharp on the wall, the whole room revealed by an unshaded bulb, she rising up and forward, the lamp on an arc from nightstand to skull, the gun pointed at her belly.

The lamp landed. Its base made a terrible sound as is it cracked and gave against his bald spot. He tumbled back, rolled across the carpet, screaming.

She panted. She traced the blood across the carpet with her eyes. She looked for the gun.

It was in a puddle of bloody carpet. She grabbed it. She adjusted its weight, pulled back the hammer with both hands, and aimed it.

Scott was on his feet. He yanked the door open, tearing the chain from the frame.

She hoped he would run. She yelled: “Fucker!”

Scott froze. She froze. In the door was a shape, taller than Scott, in jeans and a gasoline jacket, with a mess of black hair.

Colin.

With a fist that started high, next to his ear, Colin laid Scott low. He folded into a pile in the doorway at Colin’s feet.

Colin looked into the room at Candace. “Are you—,” he was breathing hard, “—going to shoot one of us?”

“If I have to,” she said.

Colin stepped over Scott and came casually toward Candace, hand out. “If this guy’s going to be shot, it should really be me. I’ve—”

Scott rolled out of the doorway, was on all fours for a minute, and then bolted into the parking lot.

“Shit!” Candace yelled.

“Let him go,” said Colin.

“He’ll call my father!” She ran for the door.

“We should go!”

She stopped, stood sideways in the door, and squeezed off three shots into the night. She’d never fired a gun before. She had beautiful form.

Colin admired.

She looked back at him, saw the look on his face. “I think he was going to kill me.”

“And you were going to kill him?”

“I—” She really didn’t have an answer for that question.

“What about me?”

She made a questioning face.

“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked.

She looked into his eyes. She became aware of the heat coming off the pistol.“I might,” she said. The gun was in her right hand pointed at the floor. She hadn’t caught her breath. Colin came closer. She pulled the hammer back, gun still pointed down. “He took the diamond,” she said. “You should hurry. You might still—”

Colin reached out and slowly, gently plucked the diamond from her bustier. “Did he now?”

She looked at it, pinched there between his fingers, like a glass strawberry. “Is it worth getting shot for?”

Colin made a face, then decided. “No.” He threw it on the bed. “I’ll go right now. If you want.”

She looked into his eyes. She looked from one to the other. She became aware of the heat coming off the pistol.

“I didn’t come for the diamond,” he said.

“Just luck?”

“Fuck luck. Earned and gotten — that’s all there is.”

Her expression was blank.

“I should go, then. Either give me the gun or make sure they know I’m the one who pulled that trigger, and you should be fine.”

She nodded.

“You never have to see me again.”

She nodded, eyes still on his. “Colin.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Take the diamond.”

He raised his eyebrows further.

“And take me, too. Take me with you.”

He turned around and picked up the diamond. “If you want, I’ll throw this thing away right now. Far as I can.”

She shook her head. “We’ll need it,” she said. “In Vegas.”

He held out the diamond and an empty hand.

“No,” she said. “I’m keeping the gun.”

Writing © Will Hindmarch.

Original art © Kevin Dart, cited here without permission.

From here, atop the IDL, the bridge only departs. That way, today or yesterday. This way, today or tomorrow. Depends when you come from.

She’s wearing a sleek but massive open parka, lined with synthetic fur. She doesn’t look the same—short hair angling forward, her body thinning with illness—but her blue eyes, catching the lights of a passing lorry, are the same. He says hello as he walks north along the IDL. She comes south to him, says hello. They hug in the interstitial night.

“I’m still ten years older than you,” he says.

“I won’t worry about that tomorrow,” she says.

© Will Hindmarch. Also published as a ficlet at Ficly.com. (Thus this story was limited to 1,024 characters or fewer.) Inspired by this post at the wonderful BLDG BLOG.