One of Us

I hid the memory receiver in the bedroom and spent the rest of the day in the bathtub, slowly drinking. By the time I got out, I could piece together most of the first two days of the memory. The woman had been down in Ensenada, but she'd been by herself: mainly she'd spent the time drinking Margaritas in Housson's and a variety of other bars. The first night was pretty quiet, and by midnight she was back where she was staying, a small and run-down beach resort called Quitas Papagayo, about half a mile up the coast. I'd stayed there myself, a long time ago, and even then its halcyon days had been thirty years behind it. On the second night, drunk, she nearly ended up going home with an American sailor. On the whole I was glad she changed her mind, and bawled him out in the street instead. She kept screaming at him as he hurried away up the street, then went back in the bar and drank until it closed. God knows how she got home: she couldn't remember. Hardly the vacation of a lifetime, though I've had worse, I've got to admit.

And it hadn't been ten years ago, either. She'd taken an organizer with her, and checked her email obsessively – the dates on screen made it clear her ‘holiday’ had taken place only a couple of days before she contacted me. Finally she got the email she was waiting for. It was short. Just an address. She walked straight out of the bar and got in her car, and was back in LA early evening.

The next part of the memory, the murder at the crossroads, took a long time in coming. I'd never experienced anything like it before. Though it was very recent, it was already distorted, and shot through with darkness. It was as if a process of blanking had already started, before she decided to get rid of it. I don't know why she wanted to lose the time in Ensenada as well: when you take other people's memories, you don't always get all the thoughts that happened during them. It's like some people's sense data and internal workings take part in different parts of their head, like they've trained a part of their mind to remain distant at all times. All I got during the time in the Baja was a draining feeling of misery, of a desire to be either drunk or dead – mixed with dark elation. Not a good way to feel, sure, but I got the sense that this was how she felt about half the time. Ditching two days of it wasn't going to make much difference. Perhaps she'd spent those two days working herself up to what happened – reliving certain things in part of her mind, girding herself. I don't know.

But in the end I was able to form a coherent idea of the last night, and what had happened, and learn her name when the guy used it just before she killed him. I told Deck everything I could remember, from the way the crossroads had looked, to the way the man called Ray winked, to the number of shots she pumped into his body. The feeling of emptiness as she stared down at the corpse, reloading the gun for the sake of it.

The numb despair, as she ran away, at realizing that it had made no difference.

Laura Reynolds was breathing easy, apparently now asleep. Retelling the memory made me feel something new towards her, though I wasn't sure what. Guilty, perhaps. I'd taken something that had previously only been in our heads, and brought it out into the world. I'd never done that before, and regarded the confidentiality of my profession with a kind of half-assed pride. I hedged the feeling down, told it to go away. She'd deliberately dumped something on me which could get me sent to prison for ever.

Deck was standing at the window when I got back, looking down at the street. The sky was beginning to lighten round the edges, and somewhere the smog machines were stirring into life. Looked like we were heading for a hot day, unless the chemicals in the sky decided they fancied a blizzard instead. Being a weather man in LA isn't the joke job it used to be.

When Deck spoke it was as if he was working up to something, clearing the side issues out of the way first. ‘Who do you think the guys at the end were?’

‘I have no idea. They're weren't cops, I'm pretty sure of that.’

‘Why?’

‘Don't know. Something about them. Plus they looked familiar.’

‘Plenty cops look familiar to me.’

‘Not like that. An old memory.’

‘Yours?’

‘I think so. I don't think they sparked anything in her at all.’

‘Could it be them who've been in here?’

I shook my head. ‘They didn't see me, remember? – I wasn't actually there. I didn't do anything. It just feels as if I did.’

He looked at me. ‘You know what will happen if you're caught with that in your head?’ He's warned me about this since I started memory work.

‘Murder One. Or Half, at least.’

He shook his head. ‘You don't know the half of it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Deck walked past the door, and rootled through the pile of yesterday's news. I guess I should cancel the hardcopy paper, save a few trees somewhere: but reading it off a screen isn't ever going to be the same. He found the edition he was looking for, and handed it to me.

I scanned the front page:

There might be an earthquake at some stage.

A property entrepreneur called Nicholas Schumann had killed himself in a spectacular way: financial problems cited. I remembered the name, vaguely: he might even have been one of the wheels who redeveloped Griffith. Must have taken some piece of phenomenal stupidity for him to have lost all that money.

The weather was still fucked, and they didn't think they could fix it.

‘So what?’ I said.

‘Page three,’ Deck said

I turned to it, and found an article about a murder which had happened six days earlier. It recapped how an unarmed man had died from multiple gunshot wounds in the street in Culver City. It implied that the cops had a number of leads, which meant for the time being they had jack shit, but they were working it hard. It gave the age of the deceased, his profession, and also his name.

Captain Ray Hammond, LAPD.

I closed my eyes.

‘She killed a cop,’ Deck said. ‘Better still, take a look at the last line. I wouldn't even have remembered the piece, except for that. Guess who's in charge of the case?’

I read it aloud, the words like the sound of a heavy door being triple locked. ‘Lieutenant Travis, LAPD Homicide.’

I looked slowly up at Deck, suddenly properly afraid. Up until now, the situation had merely been disastrous. Now it had sailed blithely into a realm where adjectives didn't really cut it any more. It would have taken a diagram to explain, one showing the intersection of a creek and some shit, and making clear the lack of any implement for promoting forward propulsion.

Deck stared back at me. ‘You're fucked,’ he said.

Five

I crashed at six. One minute I was sitting on the sofa talking to Deck, next thing I was out. I'd been awake for forty-eight hours, and my brain was carrying more than the usual load. I was too exhausted to dream much, and all I could remember when I woke up a little after nine was another image of the silver car from the end of Laura's memory. I was standing by a road, I don't know where, but it seemed familiar. On either side was swampy woodland, and the road stretched out straight to the horizon, shimmering in the heat. Something hurtled towards where I was standing, moving so fast that at first I couldn't tell what it was. Then I saw that it was a car, the sun beating down on it so hard that it almost looked as if it was spinning. As it got closer it began to slow down, and when it drew level I woke up.

I didn't know what it meant, other than that part of my brain was evidently trying to get some things in order, and had been since Ensenada. I wished it well. My mind wasn't exactly razor-sharp before it became a flop-house for other people's hand-me-downs, and I now had far more pressing things to worry about.

‘She's moving,’ Deck said.

I stood at the bedroom door and waited impatiently while Ms Reynolds stirred towards consciousness. It looked like it was a long journey, and it took a while. Now that I was properly awake, panic was beginning to resurface, but I didn't poke her with a stick or anything. For the time being I was still hoping the whole situation could be resolved amicably.

Eventually her eyes opened. They were pretty red, a combination of hangover and the remnants of having been in shock. She stared at me for a while without moving.

‘Where?’ she croaked.

‘Griffith,’ I said. I had a glass of water in my hand, but she wasn't getting it just yet.

‘How?’

‘I brought you here.’

She sat up, wincing at the pain in her arms. She must have temporarily forgotten what the source might be, because when she looked down and saw the stitches her lips tightened and her face fell: a small and private look of sorrow and disappointment. I couldn't tell whether this was because it had happened, or because it had failed.

I gave her the water, and she drank.

‘Why would you do that?’ she asked, when she'd finished.

‘You were going to die otherwise. As it is, you're not allowed to go bungee jumping. Want some chicken soup?’

She stared at me. ‘I'm a vegetarian.’

‘Right – your body is a temple. Full of money-changers like vodka and smack.’

‘Look, who are you?’

‘Hap Thompson,’ I said.

She was out of the bed with a speed I found frankly impressive, though once on her feet she swayed alarmingly. ‘The front door's locked, and the windows don't open,’ I added. ‘You're not going anywhere.’

‘Oh yeah? Just watch me,’ she said, as she pushed past and swished out into the living room. Deck looked up, and she glared at him, face pale. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Deck,’ he said, equably. ‘Friend of Hap's.’

‘That's nice. Look, where are my clothes?’

I picked my coat off the end of the sofa and fished in the pockets. Two bras, a pair of panties, and a dress of some thin green material. I held them out to her. Laura looked at me as if I'd offered to crack a walnut between my buttocks.

‘And?’

I shrugged. ‘It's all I could carry.’

‘And my purse is where?’

‘Back in the hotel room.’

‘Are you some kind of monster? You kidnap a woman and don't bring her purse?’

Deck grinned at me. ‘She's real friendly, isn't she?’

Laura turned on him. ‘Look, fuckhead – do you mind if I call you that? – kidnapping's a federal offence. You guys are lucky I'm not on the phone right now, talking to the police.’

‘Memory dumping's a crime too,’ I said. ‘Not to mention murder. You and I both know the last thing you're going to do is get in touch with the cops.’

Her eyes went blank, and she did a good impression of total lack of recall. ‘What murder?’ she said. For a moment it was hard to believe this was someone I'd fished out of a bloody bath in the small hours. She looked like the kind of bank manager who could make you shrivel to a raisin with a raised eyebrow. Either Woodley had done a superb job in patching her up, or she was as tough as all hell.

‘Nice try,’ I said, holding her eyes, ‘but it's not going to work with me. I do this for a living. You lost the event itself, but you still know what you lost. You'll remember seeking me out, and you'll remember why.’

‘You took the job. You got paid.’

‘You lied. And I only got a third of the money.’

‘I'll get you the rest.’

‘I'm not sure I believe you have it, and I don't want it either way. Don't worry – you'll get a refund. Judging by last night, it looks like the dump didn't really work out for you anyway.’

Laura glared at me, then marched over to the front door. She gave the handle a tug. It was, as advertised, locked. ‘Open this door,’ she commanded.

‘Coffee?’ Deck asked me, poised with kettle in hand over in the kitchenette.

Laura kicked the door, nearly toppling herself over in the process. ‘Open it.’

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Think I've got some mint mocha left somewhere.’

She stomped back to me. I thought I was going to catch a slap in the face, but she just snatched her clothes and banged off into the bathroom, where she slammed and locked the door. I decided ‘tough as hell’ was the answer to my question.

‘She going to be okay in there?’ Deck asked.

‘Unless she can break the window and absail ten floors.’

‘No,’ he said, patiently. ‘I mean – okay.’

I knew what he meant. ‘I think so.’ I suspected that trying to kill yourself first thing in the morning, with a hangover and two men annoying the hell out of you, was a different affair to doing it in the small hours with no-one around.

Deck found the coffee, poured it into a cafetiere. I used to have a coffee machine like everybody else. You tell them where the coffee beans are, and how to use the tap, and it's ready whenever you want it. But through a design error the hole the coffee comes out of is rather closer to the machine's posterior than you would hope, and after seeing the little biomachine squatting over a cup, grunting with effort, I tend to go off the idea of a hot beverage. When it goes wrong, as they invariably do, the result tastes very strange indeed. Mine got sick, with what I suspect was the coffee machine equivalent of food poisoning, and I just couldn't have it in the house any longer. I put it in the alley behind the building late at night and it was gone the next day. Maybe it made its way down to Mexico to be with its comrades. If so, it must have been in a different group from the ones I'd passed on the way to Ensenada. They tend to hold grudges, apparently, and between them they could easily have forced me off the road. Maybe they just didn't get a good look at my face.

Deck handed me a cup. ‘She's not going to just take it back.’

‘No kidding.’ Having met Laura Reynolds properly, I was now wishing I had woken her up with a pointy stick. I was also finding it hard to believe I'd ever expected things might go differently. ‘So we go with that time-honoured favourite, Plan B.’

‘Which is?’

‘Exactly the same, except we just have to keep her locked up while I get hold of the transmitter.’ The sound of water and occasional bad-tempered stomping made it clear that Laura was now taking a shower. I was looking forward to being harangued when she got out for not bringing her shampoo and cotton balls.

‘By the way,’ Deck said, ‘that weirdo called. Quat.’

My next move, on a plate. ‘Shit – why didn't you say?’

Deck shrugged. ‘Didn't know it was important, and he was done before I could pick it up. You set a callback, apparently. Just said he was around, you wanted to talk to him.’

I started moving. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

‘Absolutely not. Fuck off.’

I waited.

He grinned. ‘Baby-sitting, I assume.’

‘I have to go see him.’

‘Why not just call?’

‘He won't do business that way.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘Very quick.’

Deck settled himself on the sofa, pointed a finger at me. ‘Better be. I suspect Laura Reynolds is a person who's going to take some handling when she gets mad. Going to take your charm and winning ways.’

‘Half hour at most,’ I said.

The lobby downstairs was quiet, just a few people setting up their stalls. During the day most of them sell arts and crafts – inexplicable things fashioned out of pieces of wood originally used for something else, which you take home and move from room to room until you realize the attic is the best place for them. Someone else's attic, preferably. It is my firm belief that in the afterglow of our civilization, when all we have made is come to nought and our planet slumbers once more, home only to a few valiant creatures – bugs, probably – who have the courage to struggle through whatever nemesis we have wrought on Mother Nature, some alien race will land and do a spot of archaeology. And all they'll find, particularly in coastal areas, is layers of mirrors made from reclaimed floorboards with homespun wisdom etched on them with a soldering iron, or pockets of driftwood sculptures of fishing boats which rock when pushed, and they'll nod sadly amongst themselves and admit that this was a civilization whose time had come.

I quickly located Tid, the guy who'd parked my car, and gave him the usual ten spot. I like to think this is a voluntary arrangement, showing great generosity on my part, but I suspect that without it I'd never find out where my car had been put. Tid's a small, disreputable-looking man who seems to live solely on M&Ms, but we'd always got on well enough. Money's like that: promotes straightforward relationships. I slipped him an extra twenty, and asked him to do me a favour, then ran down to the parking lot under the building.

The car was parked over on the far side, nestled into a dark corner. This was perfect for me, because I wasn't going anywhere. I got inside, set the alarm and locked the doors.

Most people go in the Net via their homes, obviously. Though my account was now billed to the apartment, I still had the rig in the car because over the last couple of years it had remained the most stable environment in my life. I bought it after my first couple months' work for REMtemps, and had it fully kitted out. As I accumulated more money, I upgraded and tweaked to the point where even I couldn't remember where all the wires were. Ripping it all out and reconstructing it in the apartment was one of those things I never quite got round to, like throwing away biros which didn't work properly. Or getting a life.

The console in the car plays images direct into the brain, so I don't have to wear VR goggles. All I had to do was flip the switch, close my eyes, and be transferred to the other side.

The light changed, and instead of being underground I was in my standard driveway home page, facing out towards a leafy residential district of small-town America. I put my foot down and pulled out into the road. My netcar looks like a souped-up '59 Caddy, complete with retro fins and powder-blue paint job, but the engine characteristics are bang up-to-date. I don't mind driving fast in the Net, because of the in-built anti-collision protocol – in fact sometimes I speed straight at other people just for the pure hell of it. It's especially fun if you come across one of those die-hards who refuse to get with the new metaphor, and insist on trawling the Net on surfboards. You see them occasionally, old hippies scraping along the road on boards equipped with little skateboard wheels, complaining about the traffic and muttering about the good old days of browser wars.

I turned left out of my street and tore down the trunk lines for a while, then hung a right and cut up into the personal domain hills on the other side. You have to slog through a lot of cyber suburbia these days – family sites full of digitized vacation videos and mind-numbing detail on how little Todd did in his tests – before you get out into the darker zones. It used to be that you could type in a URL and leap straight to anyone's home page. But when they folded out into three-dimensional spaces and started to look like real homes – and their owners started spending actual time there – things changed. They wanted you to walk up the path and ring a doorbell like a civilized person. With most other places you can still just jump straight to the general district, but not where I was going – and the jams at the jump links are often so bad you're usually better just putting your foot down and going the long way round. Thus what had started as an alternative reality ended up just being another layer of the same old same old, operating on more-or-less similar rules.

Humans are like that. Very literal-minded.

I reminded myself, as usual, that I ought to visit my grandparents soon. Now was not the time. It seldom was. They retired to the Net six years ago, about two weeks ahead of the Grim Reaper. Bought themselves a scrabby virtual farm way out on the edge of Australasia. Net just before they died, and had themselves transferred. Unfortunately they were ripped off by their realtor, and the resolution is fucked. It's just polygons and big blocks of colour out where they live, and voices sound like they're coming through speakers which had an earlier life in a thrash ambient band. I guess I could phone them from out in the real world, but that gives me the creeps: too much like pretending they're still alive. They are – were, whatever – good people, and I'm glad that in some sense I still have access to them, but there are barriers which I suspect shouldn't be breached. We still don't know as much about the mind as we think we do, and there's something a little off about them now, as if the rough edges got lost in the translation. Show me a person without a bit of sand in their nature, and I'll show you someone a little creepy.

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