One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
but believe me – that's the way other people's lives work. They're both more bizarre and more trivial than you can imagine. Most clients had far worse reasons for forgetting something for a while: in a way I sort of respected her attitude, and wished I had a woman who was taking me that seriously.
I still didn't see why we were doing the cloak and dagger stuff. All she had to do was specify me when she booked the storage.
So she told me. She was going to be away for ten days.
Stratten wouldn't accept a booking for more than a week, I knew that. He seemed to have pretty much cornered the memory market, and I assumed therefore that he was kicking back to a couple of key cops somewhere, but if they heard he was extending the time limit all bets would be off. Also, the memory the woman wanted to leave wasn't a fragment. It was for the whole period, three entire days.
No-one had ever tried anything remotely that long before.
I thought I was going to say no, but instead found myself just telling her the money she was offering wasn't enough. I would have to go on leave from REMtemps for a week and a half. I could earn that much anyway in that time, without the risk of pissing Stratten off.
‘Fifty grand,’ she said.
I have a way of dealing with temptation. I just succumb, and get it over with.
Early the following afternoon I sat in my room and waited for the transmission. A third of the money for the current job was already in my hands, and on its way to three different accounts. The rest would come later. The woman had found a hacker with a lashed-up transmitter, and this dweeb had been able to acquire the code of my receiver. This spooked me a little. I made a mental note to find some way of hinting to Stratten, when the job was done, that the system wasn't as impregnable as he thought. If he wasn't careful the black market was going to start cutting into his business. Worse than that, memory temps could find themselves stuffed with all kinds of shit they weren't expecting or being paid for.
I spoke on the phone with the woman and arranged a time for her to take the memory back. It was a different number from the one she'd originally given me: presumably the home of the hacker.
Then I closed my eyes and got myself ready to receive.
It came moments afterwards. A pulse of noise and smell that filled my mind like the worst migraine you've ever had, magnified a hundredfold. I grunted, unable even to shout, and pitched forward out of the chair onto the carpet, hands and legs spasming. I seemed to go deaf and partly blind for a while, but that was the least of my problems. I thought I was going to die.
After a few minutes the shaking lessened – enough that I could crawl to the bedside table and grab a cigarette. I hauled myself up onto the bed and lay face down for a while, waiting for the pain to go away. It started to, eventually.
Half an hour later I was sitting up and drinking, which helped. My sight was clearing and I could hear once more the sound of people larking around by the pool below my window. I still felt like shit, but at least I was going to live.
The brain is designed to accept life piecemeal – not as sounds, sights, feelings and tactile impressions condensed into a single bullet of remembrance. Our minds are structured by time, and like things delivered sequentially. I hadn't really considered the difference between getting a quick, single fragment of someone's life, and taking on three days' worth of experience in one hit. It was like having the world reconfigured as a place where time and space meant nothing, and everything was one. If I hadn't already spent years bench-pressing with my mind I'd probably have been slumped in a corner, drooling and staring into nothingness.
As it was my head was still humming and thudding, trying to wade through what it had received and sort it into chronology and types. I could feel countless threads of data squirming over each other like snakes, searching for some kind of order. Sunburn on my shoulder; salt on my lips from a Margarita; a flash of sun on a car window. A thousand sentences all at once, some of them leaving my head, others coming in. My brain was lurching under the weight, misfiring like a heart on the verge of arrest.
I reached unsteadily for the phone. Large amounts of room service was what was on my mind, but first I had to call the woman and let her know that the transmission had gone through. I'm quite professional about these things. I dialled the number and waited as it rang, holding the glass of iced gin up against my forehead and panting very slightly.
There was no answer. I tapped the pips and redialled. This time I gave it thirty rings, before putting the phone back again. I knew she wasn't going away until the next day, so maybe it was no big deal. By then it was forty-five minutes since the dump. Probably she was out, making arrangements – or perhaps she'd gone home.
I munched slowly through a burger delivered by an offensively self-confident bellboy, keeping half an eye on what was going on in my head. It felt like a hard drive running optimization software, without enough slack to swap all the data around. Fragments of her golden vacation were lodging into place, but the rest was still jumbled and hazy.
When I was done with the food I called the number again. I let it ring for a long time and was about to put it down when someone answered. ‘Hello,’ said a voice I didn't recognize. ‘Who is this?’ There was a weird sound in the background, like a tannoy.
‘Hap Thompson,’ I answered, slightly taken aback. ‘Is my client there?’
‘How the fuck do you expect me to know, dickweed?’ snarled the voice, and the connection was severed.
I tried the number again, immediately. It rang, but there was no answer. Then I called the operator. She told me there was no fault on the line but wouldn't give me the address.
I called Quat. He said he'd call me back. I stumbled around the room for ten minutes, gobbling aspirin like candy.
Quat called, hack done. The number was from a booth in the first class departure lounge of O'Hare airport.
I called the other number I had for the woman. The line was dead. Then I blacked out.
When I came to, I was pretty scared. Two reasons. The first is that it had never happened to me before, except the tiny blips you got immediately after receiving a memory. The second was that my client had clearly fucked me over.
I checked out of the hotel and drove fast back to LA along Highway 1, bolting myself into the apartment. I panicked when I found a note had been stuffed under the door, but it was only from my old neighbours, the Dickenses. They were a nice young couple with three kids, originally from Portland. Year ago someone came up with an idea to sell everyone on how well the country was doing. They invented an imaginary family: parents of a certain age, such-and-such background, current and past employment, recreational habits, kids' sexes, ages, SAT scores and eye colour – they were very specific. Then they hung an entire campaign around it, staking their reputation on claiming that such a family was so many dollars better off every week – thinking nobody could disprove it. Problem was, they screwed up. There was such a family – the Dickenses. Some suit in the Statistics Bureau panicked and took a contract out on them, and they'd been on the run ever since. The note just said they'd seen someone sniffing around, and they were gone. They left me their keys, and said I could have the milk in their fridge.
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