One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
up and fresh and ready to play, I said I had to go out for a while. She took it badly, and then well, and then badly again. She tried a lot of things to get me to stay. When it was clear that wasn't working, she said she'd hang in the room and wait for me. For however long it took.
Call me someone with low self-esteem, but women don't usually react that way after a single night in my company. I'm kind of an acquired taste. It wasn't proof, but it was enough to make me gather my things and walk out the door, leaving her standing shouting after me. In the elevator I did what I'd been told to do in such circumstances, and pressed a recessed button on the side of the dream receiver. There was a soft ‘crump’ sound from within and the readout panel went black. The unit was now dead, logic board fused into inexplicability.
On the plane to Jacksonville it occurred to me to wonder why – if Candy had been some kind of federal agent – she hadn't just done whatever she needed to do while I was sleeping. If there was one thing a REMtemp was guaranteed to do most nights, it was catch some zeds. Maybe she'd needed to talk to me, get names or something. I'd only ever worked on the wrong side of the law, so I didn't know how the good guys did things. Perhaps they'd had me pegged as a potential witness against Stratten, in which case they obviously hadn't met the guy. It didn't make much difference. I had to go back to the office anyway now, to pick up a replacement receiver.
Slumped over a table in an up-market café round the corner, I mainlined a gallon of coffee and a half pack of cigarettes before reporting to REMtemps. Usually the fog faded to a soft confusion after a couple hours, but this morning it felt like I'd never slept in my whole life. I wanted to be sharp to respond to whatever proposal Stratten had in mind, but in the end I settled for being not actually asleep and just lurched over there.
This time we didn't meet in a side office, but in Stratten's own den. It was no bigger than your average football field, but luckily we sat at the same end so we didn't have to shout. I told him I'd done what he told me, and he smiled. I added that I'd fritzed the machine, also as per instructions, and that I'd need another one. He smiled again. Then he started talking.
Though I didn't know it, a number of the company's most important clients now asked for me specifically. Most REMtemps left vestiges behind, elements personal to the dreamer which they couldn't assimilate. I erased the whole lot, every little shadow and whisper. Hence the bonuses. Hence also the fact that he wanted to offer me a more lucrative line of work.
Memories.
As soon as he said the word I started shaking my head, vigorously and at high speed. Memories can be externalized, but it does't work in the same way as dreams. They can't be erased, because they are a function of something that has happened in the real world. They can merely be blanked or stored somewhere else, on a temporary or permanent basis, and doing so is absolutely and completely illegal.
For a start, it means that polygraphs don't work. If a suspect genuinely has no memory of committing a crime, fooling the lie detector is a breeze. In a way, it isn't even deception. As far as the guy's concerned, the incident has never happened.
Plus this: people are their memories. What has happened is what you are. If you remove the childhood incidents where someone learnt right from wrong, you end up with a guy who's kind of difficult to deal with. He just doesn't care. Such people don't understand why they shouldn't steal, or rape, or murder – and that makes them better at it. In the unlikely event they do get caught, another memory dump just before the polygraph will blank that line of evidence straight away.
A test case eighteen months before had settled the issue. A freelance proxy dreamer who'd agreed to carry a criminal's memory of a certain event during the trial was sentenced to two life terms – exactly half what the real culprit would have received had he been convicted.
In other words, memories weren't a trade with prospects, and I said as much to Stratten. He heard me out, and when I'd ground to a halt, he let a silence settle. After it had gone so long that it seemed like what I'd said had been to another person on some other day, he began.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The caretaking of criminal recall is illegal.’
‘Good,’ I said affably. ‘That's settled then. Where do I pick up my new receiver?’
‘However,’ Stratten continued, as if I'd said nothing at all, ‘the memories I'm referring to do not relate to illegal activities. I'm talking about trivial things, and only temporary transferrals.’
‘If they're that trivial, let the clients deal with them,’ I suggested. ‘And if it's only temporary, tell them to try a few beers instead. Nope, and no thank you. Also, no.’
‘Five thousand dollars a memory,’ he said. I stopped speaking before my mouth had even framed the next word. ‘The memory could be a single instant, an individual fact, and you'd never hold them for more than a week. Usually only a few hours. You could score a quarter million dollars over twelve months without breaking sweat. Plus you can still do the dreamwork.’
He let that sink in for a while, and I thought about it. About pulling in seven figures a year. The last couple of years had been good, but wealth has a way of operating on a sliding scale. When you've bought all the stuff you can at your current level, you start noticing the things you still can't have. And start wanting them instead.
Looked at another way: a couple years' work, some sensible investments, and I'd never have to lift a synapse again.
‘No,’ I said. I knew where I was, and I was doing okay.
‘You'll find the answer's “yes”,’ Stratten said, ‘when you ask me where you pick up your new receiver.’
My mind was still dulled from the night's work, and I didn't get what he was driving at. I just fed him his line. ‘Where?’
‘Unless you accept my offer, you don't,’ he said. ‘You take memory work, or you're fired.’
I stared at him. ‘You're a fucker, aren't you,’ I said.
‘I have heard that opinion expressed.’ His smile didn't waver, and I realized it wasn't a smile and probably never had been.
I looked out the window for a while, more to keep him waiting than for any other reason. I understood now that Candy hadn't really liked me, and that she hadn't even been a Fed. She'd been nothing more than a manipulation tool, hired by Stratten. He would have known that I'd just woken up when he called, and that I'd be unable to judge the situation properly after a night full of heavy bonuses and bed-oriented frolicking. He was right. Candy had done her job well.
In that moment I understood both that I didn't really have any idea of what Stratten was capable of, and that I just couldn't tell with women any more. I'm not sure which was worse.
Stratten had me, and he knew it. Without dreamwork I was back on the streets. I had money squirrelled away, spinning round the tracks Quat had laid for it in the ether, but not enough. Too much of it had been pissed away.
With memory work I could buy my own bar, if it came to it.
‘Okay,’ I said.
At two-thirty in the morning I saw her, walking up the street towards a small hotel a couple blocks off the Boulevard. It was called the Nirvana Inn, but unless that ineffable plane has peeling paint on the outside and no room service after ten, I suspect the name was a bit of a misnomer. I was sitting in a diner opposite, drinking bad coffee and biding my time, and I recognized her immediately. It was Laura Reynolds. No question.
This was the first time I'd seen someone I was caretaking for, and it felt disturbing, wrong. Like remembering you're dead, or seeing a doppelgänger who looks nothing like you. She was late twenties, thin and wired – trying to remember how to look like drift life after years of learning to forget. Her face was bony, pretty, intense. She walked like someone who'd spent most of the evening in a bar, and flash-lit by neon in the slanting rain she looked like a computer sprite which had suddenly