Michael Marshall Smith

One Of Us

For Tracey,

sister, friend

and for those who have become invisible:

Sue, Peggie, Betty, Clarice and Mabel

The invisible is the secret face of the visible. M. Merleau-Ponty

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One - REMtemp

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two - Missing

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Three - Becoming Visible

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Thanks to …

About the Author

By Michael Marshall Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Night. A crossroads, somewhere in deadzone LA. I don't know the area, but it's nowhere you want to be. Just two roads, wide and flat, stretching out four ways into the world: uphill struggles to places that aren't any better, via places which are probably worse.

Dead buildings squat in mist at each corner, full of sleep and quietness. It seems like they lean over above us like some evil cartoon village, but that can't be right. Two-storey concrete can't loom. It's not in its nature. The city feels like a grid of emptiness, as if the structures we have introduced to it are dwarfed by the spaces which remain untouched, as if what is not there is far more real than what we see.

A dog shivers out the end of its life meanwhile, huddled in the doorway of a twenty-four-hour liquor store. The light inside is so yellow it looks like the old guy asleep behind the counter is floating in formaldehyde. When she was younger, the woman would have done something to help the dog. Now she finds herself unable to care. The emotion's too old, buried too deep – and the dog's going to die anyway.

I don't know how long we wait, standing in the shadowed doorway, hiding deep in her expensive coat. She gets through half a pack of Kims, but she's smoking fast and not wearing a watch. It feels like an eternity, as if this corner in the wasteland is all I've known or ever will see; as if time has stopped and sees no compelling reason to start flowing again.

Eventually the sound of a car peels off from the backdrop of distant noise and enters this little world. She looks, and sees a sweep of headlights up the street, hears the rustle of tyre on blacktop, the hum of an engine happy with its job. Her heart beats a little more slowly as we watch the car approach, her mind cold and dense. It isn't even hatred she feels, not tonight or any more. When the cancer of misery has a greater mass than the body it inhabits, it's the tumour's voice you hear all the time. She's stopped fighting it now. All she wants is some peace.

The car pulls up thirty yards along the street, alongside an address she spent two months tracking down, and ended up paying a hacker to find. The engine dies, and for the first time she glimpses the man's face through the dirty windshield. Shadowed features, oblivious in their own world of turning things off and unfastening the seatbelt. Seeing him isn't climactic, and comes with no roll of drums. It just makes us feel tired and old.

He takes an age to get out of the car, leaning across to gather a pack of cigarettes from off the dash. I don't know for sure that's what he's doing, but that's what she decides. It seems to be important to her, and what she feels about this man is far too complex for me to interpret. She is calm, mind whirling in circles so small you can't really see them at all, but her heart is beating a little faster now, and as he finally opens the door and gets out of the car, we start to walk towards him.

He doesn't notice, at first, still fumbling with his keys. She stops a few yards from the car, and he looks up blearily. Drunk, perhaps – though she doesn't think so. He was always too much in control. Probably just tired, and letting it show while there's no-one around to see. He's older, greyer than she was expecting, but with the same slightly hooded eyes. He looks early fifties, trim, a little sad. He doesn't recognize her, but smiles anyway. It's a good smile, and may once have been quite something, but it doesn't reach the eyes any more.

It's about now that the other car first appears, way off down the other road. I didn't notice it the first time, and she never does. She just stares at him, waiting. A generic smile isn't enough. We want him to know who we are. The bond operates in two directions. She cannot break it alone.

‘Help you?’ he asks eventually, peering at her. He stands by the car, back straight. He's not frightened, sees no need to be, but he's beginning to sense this is not a run-of-the-mill encounter. All he sees is a skinny woman in a good coat, a confidence too often used as something to hide behind. But there's something about us which disturbs him, reminds him of someone he used to be.

‘Hello Ray,’ she says, and then nothing else, waiting for him to remember.

Maybe it's something in her face that does it, puts him in mind of a grin long ago. His eyes open wider and some measure of confidence returns, his face relaxing a little. A picture of reliability. They look at each other for a while, but by now my attention is on the sound of the car. I know it's coming, big and silver and fast.

‘It's Laura, isn't it?’ Ray asks eventually. Her name is still there, near the front of his mind. Maybe it always has been, the way his has been in hers. He nods. ‘Yes, it's you.’ He gives a short, bewildered laugh, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. ‘I never forget a face.’ His left eyelid droops slowly, a little uncertainly. He clicks the wheel of his lighter and starts bringing it up to his face.

The wink is like returning to a childhood playground, and finding a swing still rocking as if you had only just this moment climbed down. It's enough.

The first shot goes straight through his left eye, blatting a baseball of shit out of the back of his skull. He's still trying to back away as the next bullet tears through his groin, and as another splashes through most of his throat. But then he's on the ground, legs spastically twitching, as we step forward to stand over him.

The dog watches it all, from its patch by the wall, but it's got problems of its own and Ray's going to die anyway.

She doesn't stop firing until the gun is empty. The body is still by then, and has nothing worth speaking of above the neck. The cigarette alone is almost intact, clamped between lips which look like something out of an autopsy wastebasket. She decides to leave it that way.

I put my hand in her pocket, and pull out another clip. Her hands are trembling a great deal by then, and I think she already knows she has failed. While she's still fumbling to reload, she finally notices the sound of a car hurtling towards her. Her head jerks up.

I know immediately that it's not the cops, and that I've seen the car somewhere before. Laura doesn't. She doesn't know what to think. Her mind is too empty and fractured to make a decision, and her body makes it for her.

We back away, stumbling over our feet and dropping the gun. Then we turn and run, expecting to die and asking only why it has taken so long.

We glance back for an instant, and see the car has pulled to a halt in the middle of the crossroads. The doors are open, and two figures are standing over Ray's remains. The men are of identical height, wear matching light grey suits, and have eyes that don't look right.

One picks up the gun; the other shouts ‘Shit! Shit shit shit!’ in a voice so deep and loud that I wonder how the buildings around us remain standing. He turns slowly towards us, a streetlamp directly behind his head casting a nimbus of yellow light.

We disappear round the corner before he sees us, and run until we fade into black.

PART ONE REMtemp

One

I was in a bar in Ensenada, drinking a warm beer quickly and trying to remind myself that I hadn't murdered anyone, when my alarm clock caught up with me. Little bastard.

Housson's was full to the rafters and noisy as hell, and not just because everyone was talking very loudly. Two local alfalfa barons had come into the bar to celebrate some deal, perhaps a merging of their cash-crop-related dynasties, and an eight-piece mariachi band had joyfully latched onto them and settled in for the night. The rest of the bar was a Jackson Pollock of local colour: seedy photographers trying to charge tourists for pictures, leather-faced ex-pats peering around the place like affronted owls, and Mexicans setting about getting drunk with commendable seriousness. The bar looks like it was last redecorated about forty years ago, by someone who had the more functional end of the Wild West in mind: dusty floorboards, walls painted with second-hand cigarette smoke, chairs stolen from some church hall. The only nod in the direction of decor are the fading sketches of ex-barmen, renowned alcoholics and similarly distinguished local characters which adorn the walls. One of these had already come crashing to the ground, the casualty of a bottle hurled by a disgruntled drunkard, and all in all the atmosphere was just one step short of chaos.

I was tired and my head hurt, and I shouldn't have been there in the first place. I should have been out on the streets, or checking different bars, or even heading back to LA. Anywhere but here. She was nowhere to be seen, and as I hadn't had the time to go to a coincidence dealer before I left LA, I didn't expect her to just wander in. I was still pretty confident the Chicago lead was a deliberate false trail, but didn't have any particularly good reason to believe she'd have run to Ensenada either. I was just there to drink beer and avoid the problem.

The older of the two businessmen looked like he consumed a fair amount of his alfalfa personally, but he'd obviously done a bit of singing in the distant past and was now working steadily through his repertoire, to the delight of the assembled henchmen and underlings. One of these, a slimy little turd I pegged as the accountant son-in-law of one of the principals, was busy eyeing up a group of young local women who were cheerily clapping along at the next table. As I watched I saw him signal to the non-singing baron, who turned and clocked the girls. His smile broadened to the kind of leer which would make a werewolf look bashful and charming, and he beckoned the leader of the band over, more money already in his hand.

I was sitting to one side of a table crammed with tourists, the only seat that had been free when I'd entered over two hours before. The girls were red-faced from the day's sun, and fizzing with Margarita-fuelled bravado; the guys sipping their Pacificos sullenly and panning their eyes around the bar, probably trying to work out which of the locals was going to come and try to steal their women first. I could have told them that it was much more likely to be another American, probably one of the boisterous frat rats who were in town for some damnfool motorcycle race, but I didn't know them and couldn't be bothered. In fact, they were getting on my nerves. The girls were dancing in their seats in that way people do when they're letting themselves off a very short leash, and the nearest one kept banging into my arm and causing me to spill beer and cigarette ash onto jeans which hadn't been that clean when I'd pulled them on two days ago.

When I felt the tap on my shoulder I turned irritably, expecting to see the waiter who was working that corner of the room. I like attentive service as much as the next man, but Christ, there's a limit to how fast a man can drink. In my case that limit is pretty high, and yet this guy was still hassling me well before I'd finished each beer. It was good that the waiter was there, because the only way I could have gotten to the bar was with a chainsaw, but I felt he needed to calm down a little. I was in the middle of deciding to tell him to go away – or at least to do so after he'd brought me another drink – when I realized it wasn't him at all, but a fat American who looked like he'd killed a dirty sheep and glued it to his chin.

‘Fella asking for you,’ he shouted.

‘Tell him to fuck off,’ I said. I didn't know anyone in Ensenada, not any more, and didn't wish to start making new acquaintances.

‘Seems pretty insistent,’ the guy said, and jerked his thumb back towards the bar. I glanced in that direction, but there were far too many people in the way. ‘Little black fella, he is.’

In those parts this could mean the guy was actually black, or an indigenous Mexican Indian. Didn't really make much difference – I still didn't want to talk to him – but it surprised me that my fellow countryman hadn't felt qualified to tell him to fuck off by himself. The guy with the beard didn't look the type to run errands for ethnic majorities.

‘Well then tell him to fuck off politely,’ I snarled into a moment of relative quiet, and turned back to face the mariachi band.

They immediately and noisily embarked on yet another song, which sounded eerily identical to all the others. It couldn't be, though, because it got an even bigger cheer than usual, and the singing businessman clambered unsteadily onto a chair to give it his all. I took a sip of my beer, wishing the waiter would hurry up and hassle me again, and waited with grim anticipation for the alfalfa king to pitch headlong into the table of girls. That should be worth watching, I felt.

Then I became aware of a sound. It was quiet, and barely audible below the baying of voices and barking of trumpets, but it was getting louder.

‘Told him, like you said,’ the American behind me boomed. ‘Didn't take it very well.’

A beeping sound. Almost like …

I closed my eyes.

‘Hap Thompson!’ a tinny voice squealed suddenly, cutting effortlessly through the noise in the bar. Then it went back to beeping, getting louder and louder, before sirening my name again. I tried to ignore it, but it wasn't going to go away. It never does.

Within a minute the beeping was so loud that the mariachi band began turning in my direction. Gradually they stopped playing, the instruments fading out one by one as if their players were being serially dropped off a cliff. I swore viciously and ground my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Heads turned, and a silence descended on the bar. The last person to shut up was the singing businessman. He was now standing weaving on the table with his arms outstretched. He would have looked quite like an opera singer in that moment, had his face not been more reminiscent of a super-middleweight boxer who'd thrown too many fights.

Taking a deep breath, I turned round.

A channel had cleared in the crowd behind me, and I could see straight to the bar. There, standing carefully so as to avoid the pools of spilt beer, was my alarm clock.

‘Oh, hello,’ it said, into the quiet. ‘Thought you hadn't heard me.’

‘What,’ I said, ‘the fuck do you want?’

‘It's time to get up, Hap.’

‘I am up,’ I said. ‘I'm in a bar.’

‘Oh,’ said the clock, looking around. ‘So you are.’ It paused for a moment, before surging on. ‘But it's still time to get up. You can snooze me once more if you want, but you really ought to be out and about by half past nine.’

‘Look, you little bastard,’ I said, ‘I am up. It's a quarter past nine in the evening.’

‘No it isn't.’

‘Yes it is. We've been through this.’

‘I have the time as nine-seventeen precisely–a.m.’ The clock angled itself so that I – and everyone else – could read its display clearly.

‘You've always got the time as a.m.,’ I shouted, standing to point at it. ‘That's because you're broken, you useless piece of shit.’

‘Hey, man,’ said one of the tourists at my table. ‘Little guy's only trying to do his job. No call for language like that.’ There was a low rumble of agreement from nearby tables.

‘That's right,’ agreed the clock, two square inches of injured innocence on two spindly little legs. ‘Just trying to do my job, that's all. Let's see how you like it if I don't wake you up, huh? We know what happens then, don't we?’

‘What?’ asked a woman at the other side of the room, her eyes sorrowful. ‘Does he mistreat you?’ With my jaw clamped firmly shut, I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter off the table and glared at the woman. She stared bravely back at me, and sniffed. ‘He looks the type.’

‘He hits me. He even throws me out the window.’ This was greeted by low mutters from some quarters, and I decided it was time to go. ‘… Of moving cars.’

The crowd stirred angrily. I considered telling them that having a broken AM/PM indicator was the least of the clock's problems, that it was also prone, on a whim, to wake me up at regular intervals through the small hours and thus lose me a night's work, but decided it wasn't worth it. Trust the little bastard to catch up with me in the one bar in the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk towards the door feeling incredibly embarrassed.

‘Wait, Hap! Wait for me!’

At the sound of the clock's little feet landing on the ground I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the short passageway outside. I clanged through the swing doors at the end, hoping one of them would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.

It didn't work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I'd thrown it out the window (for the last time) in San Diego, a quick sprint was hardly going to wind it.

‘Thanks,’ I snarled. ‘Now everyone in that fucking bar knows my name.’ I swung a kick at it, but it dodged easily, feinting to one side and then scuttling back to face me.

‘But that's nice,’ the clock said. ‘Maybe you'll make some new friends. Not only am I a useful timepiece, but I can help you achieve your socializing goals by bridging the gulf between souls in this topsy-turvy world of ours. Please stop throwing me away. I can help you!’

‘No you can't,’ I said, grinding to a halt. The night was dark, the street lit only by stuttering yellow lamps outside Ensenada's various bars, food rooms and rat-hole motels, and I felt suddenly homesick and alone. I was in the wrong part of the wrong town, and I didn't even know why I was there. Someone else's guilt, my own paranoia, or just because it was where I always used to run. Maybe all three – and it didn't really matter. I had to find Laura Reynolds, who might not even be here, before I got shafted for something I hadn't done, but remembered doing. Try explaining that to a clock.

‘You've barely explored my organizer functions,’ the clock chimed, oblivious.

‘I've already got an organizer.’

‘But I'm better! Just tell me your appointments, and I'll remind you with any one of twenty-five charming alarm sounds. Never forget an anniversary! Never be late for that important meeting! Never …’

This time the kick connected, and with a fading yelp the clock sailed clean over a line of stores selling identical rows of cheap rugs and plaster busts of ET. By the time I was fifty yards down the street the mariachi band was at full tilt again behind me, the businessman's voice soaring clear and true above it, the voice of a man who knew who he was and where he lived and what he was going home to.

I'd arrived in Mexico late the previous evening. That, at least, was when I'd woken to find myself in a car I didn't recognize, stationary but with the engine still running, by the side of a patchy road. I switched the ignition off and got out gingerly, feeling as if someone had hammered an intriguing pattern of very cold nails into my left temple. Then I peered around into the darkness, trying to work out where I was.

The answer soon presented itself, in the shape of the sharply defined geography surrounding me. A steep rock face rose behind the car, and on the other side of the road the hill disappeared abruptly – the only vegetation bushes and gnarled grey trees that seemed to be making a big point of just what a hard time they were having. The air was warm and smelled of dust, and with no city glow the stars were bright in the blackness above.

I was on the old interior road that leads down the Baja from Tijuana to Ensenada, twisting through the dark country up along the hills. There was a time when it was the only road in those parts, but now it's not lit, in bad repair, and nobody with any sense drives this way any more.

Now that I was out of the car I was able to recognize it as mine, and to dimly remember climbing into it in LA much earlier in the day. But this realization faded in and out, like a signal from a television station where the power is unreliable. Other memories were trying to shoulder it aside, clamouring for their time in the spotlight. They were artificially sharp and distinct, and trying to hide this by melding with my own recollections; but they couldn't, because the memories weren't mine and they had no real homes to go to. All they could do was overlay what was already there, like a double exposure, sometimes at the front, sometimes merely tickling like a word on the tip of your tongue.

I walked back to the car and fumbled in the glove compartment, hoping to find something else I knew was mine. I immediately discovered a lot of cigarettes, including an opened pack, but they weren't my brand. I smoke Camel Lights, always have: these were Kim. Nonetheless it was likely that I'd bought them, because the opened pack still had the cellophane round the bottom half. It's a habit of mine to leave it there, which has given my best friend Deck hours of fun taking it off and sneaking it onto the top half of the pack when I'm in the john. The memory of his trademark cackle as I yanked and snarled at a pack after such an incident suddenly bloomed in my mind, grounding me for a moment in who I was.

I screwed up my eyes tightly, and when I opened them again felt a little better.

The passenger seat was strewn with twists of foil and a number of cracked vials, and it didn't take me long to work out why. A long time ago, in a past life, I used to deal a drug called Fresh. Fresh removes the ennui which comes from custom and acquaintance, and presents everything to you, every sight, emotion and experience, as if it's happening for the first time. Part of how it does this is by masking your memories, to stop them grabbing new experience and turning it into just the same old thing. Evidently I'd been trying to replicate this effect with a cocktail of other recreational pharmaceuticals, and had ended up blacking out. On an unlit mountain road, in Mexico, at night.

Great going.

But it had evidently worked, because for the time being I was back. I started the car and pulled carefully back onto the road, after a quick mental check to make sure I was pointing in the right direction. Then I tore the filter off a Kim, lit her up, and headed South.

I only passed one other car along the way, which was good, because it meant I could drive down the middle of the road and stay as far as possible from the precipitous drops which line half the route. This left me free to do a kind of internal inventory, and to start panicking about that instead. Most of the last six hours were missing, along with a number of words and facts. I could recall where I lived, for example – on the tenth floor of The Falkland, one of Griffith's livelier apartment blocks – but not the room number. It simply wasn't available to me. Presumably I'd remember by sight: I hoped so, because all my stuff was in there and otherwise I'd have nothing to wear.

I could remember Laura Reynolds' name, and what she'd done to me. She'd evidently been with me for some of the journey down, in spirit at least: it must have been her who bought the cigarettes, though me who opened the pack. I didn't really know what she looked like, only how she appeared to herself, and I had no idea where she was. I'd probably had a good reason for heading for Ensenada, or at least a reason of some kind – assuming, of course, that it had been me who made the decision. Either way, now I was here it seemed I might as well go on.

I made good time, only having to stop once, while a herd of coffee machines crossed the road in front of me. I read somewhere that they often make their way down to Mexico. I can't see why that would be so, but there was certainly a hell of a lot of them. They came down off the hill in silence, trooped across the road in a protective huddle, and then headed off down the slope in an orderly line, searching for a home, or food, or maybe even some coffee beans.

I reached Ensenada just after midnight, and slept in the car on the outskirts of town. I dreamed of a silver sedan and men with lights behind their heads, but the message was confused and frantic, fear dancing through an internal landscape lined with doors that wouldn't open.

When I woke up more of my head was back in place, and I got it together to contact Stratten, patching the call through my hacker's network so it looked like it came from LA. I said I had a migraine and wouldn't be able to work for a couple days. I don't think he believed me, but he didn't call me on it. I spent the rest of the day fruitlessly searching taco stands and crumbling hotels, or driving aimlessly down rotting streets. By the evening this had led me to an inescapable conclusion.

She wasn't here.

From Housson's I headed straight for the street where I'd left the car. In late afternoon this particular area behind the tourist drag had seemed charmingly authentic. By mid-evening it resembled a do-it-yourself mugging emporium. Knots of alarming locals stood and stared as I passed, their feet wet from the pools of beer, urine or blood which flowed from each of the bars, but I made it back to the car in one piece. It was parked down a cul-de-sac, away from prying eyes, and it was only as I pulled my keys from out of my pocket that I realized shadows were moving on the other side of the street. The light was too patchy for me to tell who it might be, but I didn't want to meet them either way. I'm like that. Not very sociable.

Three men were soon distinguishable, heading towards me. They weren't hurrying, but that wasn't reassuring. Particularly when the glint of a tarnished button confirmed what I already suspected. Cops. Or the local equivalent, which was even worse. Could be they were just out walking their wallets, shaking down the bars; could be they'd just spotted a tourista and wanted to shake me down instead.

Or it could be that their colleagues outside Housson's had passed word to them that someone suspicious had just been hounded out of the bar by a lunatic timepiece, someone whose name had been clearly articulated. There was no reason that name should mean anything to anyone, not unless stuff had happened back in LA that I didn't know about, but I wasn't going to take any chances. I quietly opened the car door and waited, listening to the sound of their boots scuffing on the ragged road surface.

‘Hi,’ I said steadily. ‘What can I do for you guys?’

They didn't reply, but merely looked me up and down, as is the wont of such people. The third cop hung back a little, casting a glance at the licence plate of my car.

‘It's mine,’ I said. ‘The papers are in the glove compartment.’

Too late I remembered what was next to the papers and under a map. A gun. It was mine, licensed, legal – with a serial number and everything – but it would still be a very bad thing to have them find. The Baja Peninsula isn't bandit territory, but it's heading that way. Twenty years ago it had looked as if fleeing Hong Kong money might claw it up into respectability, but the cash had kept on moving, and now the dark country was taking over again, seeping down from the hills and turning the eyes of the people inwards. The cops are very keen that it's them pointing the guns at people, not the other way round.

‘Mr Thompson?’ the middle cop said. I tightened my grip on the door.

‘Yes,’ I replied. There was no point in lying. Any part of my body had it stamped there in amino acids. ‘How'd you guess? I just look like a Thompson, or what?’

‘Someone who sounds like you just had a little trouble in Housson's,’ he said, something that wasn't really a smile moving his lips. ‘With a clock.’

‘Well you know how it is.’ I shrugged. ‘They get on your nerves occasionally.’

‘I couldn't afford such a thing,’ the middle cop said. ‘Mine still runs on batteries.’

‘Probably works properly, then,’ I said, trying to be comradely. ‘And you don't have to feed it.’

‘What are you doing in Ensenada?’ the second policeman asked abruptly.

‘Holiday,’ I said. ‘Few days off work.’

‘What work?’

‘Bar work.’ Used to be true. I've done most things at one time or another. If they wanted to test me on pouring beer and making change they were welcome to it.

They all nodded together. Little, uninterested nods. The fact that this was all so chummy should have made me more relaxed. It didn't. It made me feel tense. No-one had asked me for money. No-one had asked for my papers. No-one was hunting through the cavities of my car for drugs.

So what were they doing? I hadn't done anything, after all. Not really.

Then I heard it. Very quietly at first, the sound of a car approaching in another street. Nothing exceptional about that, of course: I'm familiar with the internal combustion engine and its role in contemporary society. But I couldn't help noticing that the cop in the middle, the one who appeared to be leading this crew, glanced towards the end of the block. I followed his eyes.

Initially there was nothing to see except tourist couples walking hand in hand across the intersection, their blurred voices calling as they pointed out souvenirs to each other. For a moment I had a flash of the first time I came to Ensenada, many years ago. I remembered realizing that every bangle and every rug, every copyright infringement and Day of the Dead vignette, had been stamped out somewhere in a factory and that no-one here was selling anything unique or genuine. Realizing that, and not caring. Spending days eating fish tacos at two for a dollar, loaded high with fixings and chilli, down by the fish market where the world's most disreputable pelicans fought for scraps in a flurry of brown feathers. Cruising in the late afternoon, Country on the car stereo and Indian kids on every street corner, selling subcontracted chiclets to support their mothers' habits. And nights of shadows and distant shouting, patterns of light on water and wood fires in run-down chalets; cold breezes on the rocks at the waterfront, the warmth of someone who loved me.

That's why I used to come back here. To remember those times, and the person I was when they happened.

But the car which slowly moved into position wasn't a beat-up old Ford, and there was no-one in it that I knew. It was a squad car, and that's what the cops around me had been waiting for. It was a trap, either because they knew who I was, or because it was a slow night and they just felt like it. Either way, it was time to go.

I braced my hands against the car door and whipped it out quickly, catching two of the cops in the stomach and sending them stumbling painfully backwards. The remaining cop scrabbled for his holster but I swung a kick at his hands, smacking into his wrist and sending the gun skittering along the pavement. It had been a big night for kicking. Lucky I kept in practice.

The cops in the car down the end saw what was happening, and the vehicle leapt up the street towards me. I jammed the key in the ignition and had my own car moving before I'd even shut the door. There were shouts from the cops behind as I yanked the car round in a tight bend, scattering grit like a line of machine-gun fire, heading straight for the police vehicle.

I kept the car on course, flooring the pedal, but I knew I was going to have to turn. You don't play chicken with the Mexican police. They tend to win. I caught glimpses of tourists watching as I hammered down the road, their mouths falling open as they realized there was local colour in prospect and that the colour was likely to be red.

In the front, the faces of two cops stared back at me through their windshield as they got closer and closer. The passenger looked a little nervous, but one glance at the driver told me what I already knew. If there was going to be a domesticated egg-producing squawker in this confrontation, it sure as hell wasn't going to be him.

At the last minute I yanked the wheel to the right and went caroming off down a side street, narrowly avoiding rolling the car into a storefront. People scattered in all directions as I cursed my luck and tried to work out what I was going to do next. Behind me I heard the scream of tyres as the cops performed an inaccurate U-turn, cracking a few parked cars in the process. I hope everyone had the proper insurance. It's a false economy not to, you know, and there's a place about fifty yards from the border where you almost believe that what you're being sold is worth something. I forget the name, but check it out.

There weren't that many options available to me – you can either leave Ensenada up the coast or down. I figured on going up, but I had to try to convince the cops I was heading the other way. I made a series of hard turns towards the southern end of town – ignoring lights, screaming over the main drag at seventy and in general displaying very little concern for the finer points of road safety. A couple of cars ended up swerving onto the pavement, the drivers shouting after me before they'd even come to a halt. I could see their point, but didn't stop to discuss it.

After a few hectic minutes I couldn't see anyone following me in the mirror, so I made a sudden left and slowed the car right down, pulling in to park neatly between a couple of battered trucks by the side of the road. I edged far enough forward that I could see the crossroads, and then killed the engine. Heart thumping, I waited.

It worked. People don't really expect you to park in the middle of a car chase. They sort of assume you'll keep on driving. After a few seconds I saw the police car go flying over the intersection, but I stayed put a little while longer, wiping the sweat off my palms onto my jeans.

Then I very sedately reversed out of the space and pootled off up the road.

On the way back to the border I tried to call a friend of mine in the Net, a guy called Quat, but there was no reply. I left a message for him to get in touch with me as soon as possible, and then just concentrated on not driving into the sea. I was pretty calm by then, telling myself the Mexican cops had just been fishing, rousting a conspicuous Americano for kicks.

Just outside Tijuana I stopped to get some gas from a run-down place by the side of the road. I could have waited until I got the other side of the border, but the station looked like it needed the business. While the guy was gleefully filling my car up I took the opportunity to throw the remaining packets of Kims in the trash, and get some proper cigarettes at contraband prices.

I also elected to make use of their men's room, which was a questionable decision. The gas station claimed to be under new management, but the toilets were evidently still under some old management, or more probably governed by an organization which predated the concept of management altogether. Possibly the Spanish Inquisition. The smell was bracing, to say the least. Both of the urinals had been smashed, and one of the cubicles appeared to be where the local horses came when they needed to empty their backs. If so, someone needed to introduce them to the concept of toilet paper, and explain where exactly they should sit.

The remaining cubicle was relatively bearable, and I locked myself in and set about what I had to do. My mind was on other things, like what the hell I was going to do when I got back home, when I heard a knock on the door.

‘I'll be out in a minute,’ I said, zipping myself back up. Maybe the guy was just worried he wasn't going to get paid.

There was no answer. I was groping through the same sentence in pidgin Spanish when suddenly I realized it wouldn't be the gas jockey. He had my car keys. I wasn't going anywhere without them.

The knock came again, louder this time.

I looked quickly around, but there was no way out of the cubicle – except, of course, through the door. There never is. Take it from me, if you're ever on the run, a toilet cubicle isn't a great place to hide. They're designed with very little functional flexibility.

‘Who is it?’ I asked. There was no answer.

I had my gun with me, but that was no answer either. I'd like to think I've grown up, but it could just be that I've got more frightened. I was never a big one for firearms, and encouraging situations in which I might get my head splattered across walls had even less appeal than it used to. The gun's little more than a souvenir, and I haven't fired it in anger in four years. I've fired it in boredom, as my old CD player would testify, but that's not really enough. You have to keep in practice at senseless violence, otherwise you forget the point.

Extreme politeness was the only sensible course of action.

So I pulled the gun out, yanked open the door and screamed at whoever was there to get the fuck face down on the floor.

The room was empty. Just dirty walls and the sound of three taps dripping out of unison.

I blinked, and swivelled my head both ways round the room. Still no-one. My eyes prickled and stung.

‘Hi Hap,’ said a voice, from lower than I would have expected. I slowly tilted my head that way, bringing the gun down with my gaze.

The alarm clock waved up at me. It looked tired, and was spattered with mud.

I lost it.

‘Okay, you fuck,’ I shouted hysterically, ‘this is it. Now I'm finally going to blow you apart.’

‘Hap, you don't want to do that …’

‘Yes, I do.’

The clock backed rapidly towards the door. ‘You don't. You really don't.’

‘Give me one good reason,’ I yelled, racking a shell up into the breech and knowing that nothing the machine could come up with would be enough. By now we were back out in the lot, and I was aware of the gas guy standing by the car gaping at us, a smile freezing on his face. Maybe it wasn't fair to take the situation out on a clock, but I didn't care. It was the only potential victim around apart from me, and I was bigger than it was. I was also fading it big time. My temples felt like they were full of ice, and a patch of vision in my right eye was turning grey.

The clock knew that time was running out, and spoke very quickly. ‘I was trying to tell you something down in that smelly place. Something important.’

I aimed right at the AM/PM indicator. ‘Like what? That I have a haircut booked at four?’

‘That I'm good at some things. Like finding people. I found you, didn't I?’

Finger on the trigger, one twitch away from sending the clock to oblivion, I hesitated. ‘So? What are you saying?’

‘I know where she is.’

Two

I got into it the same way as most people, I guess. By accident.

It was a year and a half ago. I was staying the night in Jacksonville, mainly because I didn't have anyplace else to be. At the time it seemed like whenever I couldn't find a road to take me anywhere new, I wound up back in that city, like a yo-yo bouncing back to the hand that threw it away in the first place. I was planning on getting out of Florida the next day, and after my ride set me down I headed for the blocks round the bus station, where everything costs less. Last time I'd worked had been two weeks ago, at a bar down near Cresota Beach, where I grew up. They didn't like the way I talked to the customers. I didn't care for their attitude towards pay and working conditions. It had been a brief relationship.

I walked the streets until I found a place going by the inspiring and lyrical name of ‘Pete's Rooms’. The guy behind the desk was wearing one of the worst shirts I've ever seen, like a painting of a road accident done by someone who had no talent but an awful lot of paint to use up. I didn't ask him if he was Pete, but it seemed a fair assumption. He looked like a Pete. The rate was fifteen dollars a night, Net access in every room. Very reasonable – yet the shirt, unappealing though it was, looked like it had been made on purpose. Maybe I should have thought about that, but it was late and I couldn't be bothered.

My room was on the fourth floor and small, and the air smelled like it had been there since before I was born. I pulled something to drink from my bag, and dragged the room's one tatty chair over to the window. Outside was a fire escape the rats were probably afraid of using, and below that just yellow lights and noise.

I leaned out into humid night and watched people walking up and down the street. You see them in every big city, mangy dogs sniffing for a trail their instincts tell them must start around here someplace. Some people believe in God, or UFOs: others that just round a corner will be the first step on a road towards money, or drugs, or whatever Holy Grail they're programmed for. I wished them well, but not with much hope or enthusiasm. I'd tried most types of MAKE $$$ FAST!!! schemes by then, and they had got me precisely nowhere. Roads that begin just around corners have a tendency to lead you right back to where you started.

Though I grew up in Florida, I'd spent most of the previous decade on the West Coast, and I missed it. For the time being I couldn't go back, which left me with nowhere in particular to be. It felt like everything had ground to a halt, as if it would take something pretty major to get my life started up again. Reincarnation, maybe. It had felt that way before, but not quite so bleakly. It was the kind of situation that could get you down.

So I lay on the bed and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning, feeling strange. Spacey. Hollow-stomached, and as if someone had put little scratchy balls of crumpled paper inside my eyes. My watch said it was seven o'clock, which didn't make sense. The only time I see seven a.m. is when I've been awake straight through.

Then I realized an alarm was going off, and saw that the console in the bedside table was flashing. ‘Message’ it said. I screwed my eyes up tight and looked at it again. It still said I had a message. I hit the receive button. The screen went blank for a moment, and then fed up some text.

‘You could have earned $367.77 last night,’ it read. ‘To learn more, come by 135 Highwater today. Quote reference PR/43.’

Then it spat out a map. I picked it up; squinted at it.

$367.77 is a lot of nights' bar tending.

I changed my shirt and left the hotel.

By the time I reached Highwater I was already losing interest. My head felt fuzzy and dry, as if I'd spent all night doing math in my sleep. A big part of me just wanted to score breakfast somewhere and go sit on a bus, watch the sun haze on window panels until I was somewhere else.

But I didn't. I have a kind of shambling momentum, once I'm started. I followed the streets on the map, surprised to find myself getting closer to the business district. The kind of people who spam consoles in cheap hotels generally work out of virtual offices, but Highwater was a wide road with a lot of grown-up buildings on either side. 135 itself was a mountain of black plate glass, with a revolving door at the bottom. Unlike many of the other buildings I'd passed, it didn't have exterior videowalls extolling with tiresome thoroughness the virtues and success of the people who toiled within. It just sat there, not giving anything away. I went in, as much as anything just to find some shade.

The lobby was similarly uncommunicative, and likewise decked out all in black. It was like they'd acquired a job lot of the colour from somewhere and were eager to use it up. I walked across the marble floor to a desk at the far end, my heels tapping in the cool silence. A woman sat there in a pool of yellow light, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked, her tone making it clear she thought it was unlikely.

‘I was told to come here and quote a reference.’

I speak better than I look. Her face didn't light up or anything, but she tapped a button on her keyboard and turned her eyes to the screen. ‘And that is?’

I told her, and she scrolled down through some list for a while. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Here's how it is. Two options. The first is I give you $171.39, and you go away with no further obligation. The second is that you take the elevator on the right and go up to the 34th floor, where Mr Stratten will meet with you presently.’

‘And you arrive at $171.39 how, exactly?’

‘Your potential earnings less a twenty-five-dollar handling fee, divided by two and rounded up to the nearest cent.’

‘How come I only get half the money?’

‘Because you're not on contract. You go up and meet Mr Stratten, maybe that will change.’

‘And in that case I get the full $367?’

She winked. ‘You're kind of bright, aren't you?’

The elevator was very pleasant. Tinted mirrors, low lights; quiet, leisurely. It spoke of money, and lots of it. Not much happened during the journey.

When the doors opened I found myself faced with a corridor. A large chrome sign on the wall said ‘REMtemps’, in a suitably soul-destroying typeface. Underneath it said, ‘Sleep Tight. Sleep Right.’ I walked the way the sign pointed and ended up at another reception desk. The girl had a badge which said she was Sabrina, and her hair was done up in a weirdly complex manner, doubtless the result of several hours of some asswipe stylist's attention.

I'd thought the girl downstairs was a top-flight patronizer, but compared to Sabrina she was servility itself. Sabrina's manner suggested I was some kind of lower-echelon vermin: lower than a rat, for sure, maybe on a par with a particularly ill-favoured vole, and after thirty seconds with her I felt the bacteria in my stomach start to join in sneering at me. She told me to take a seat, but I didn't. Partly to annoy her, but mainly because I hate sitting in receptions. I read somewhere it puts you in a subordinate position right off the bat. I'm great at the pre-hiring tactics – it's just a shame it goes to pieces afterwards.

‘Mr Thompson, good morning. I'm Stratten.’

I turned to see a man standing behind me, hand held out. He had a strong face, black hair starting to silver on the temples. Like any other tall middle-aged guy in a sober suit, but more polished: as if he was a release-standard human instead of the beta versions you normally see wandering around. His hand was firm and dry, as was his smile.

I was shown into a small room off the main corridor. Stratten sat behind a desk, and I lounged back in the other available chair.

‘So what's the deal?’ I asked, trying to sound relaxed. There was something about the guy opposite which put me on edge. I couldn't place his accent. East Coast somewhere, probably, but flattened, made deliberately average – like an actor covering his past.

He leaned forward and turned the console on the desk to face me. ‘See if there's anything you recognize,’ he said, and pressed a switch. The console chittered and whirred for a moment, and flashed up ‘PR/43 @ 18/5/2016’.

The screen bled to black, and then faded up again to show a corridor. The camera – if that's what it was – walked forward along it a little way. Drab green walls trailed off into the distance. On the left-hand side was another corridor. The camera turned – and showed that it was exactly the same. Going a little quicker now, it tramped that way for a while, before making another turn into yet another identical corridor. There didn't seem to be any shortage of corridors, or of new turnings to make. Occasional chips in the paint relieved the monotonous olive of the walls, but other than that it just went on and on and on.

I looked up after five minutes to see Stratten watching me. I shook my head. Stratten made a note on a piece of paper, and then typed something rapidly on the console's keyboard. ‘Not very distinctive,’ he said. ‘I don't think the donor's very imaginative. And you lose a great deal, just getting the visual. Try this.’

The picture on the screen changed, and showed a pair of hands holding a piece of water. I know ‘piece of water’ doesn't make much sense, but that's what it looked like. The hands were nervously fondling the liquid, and a quiet male voice was relayed from the console's speaker.

‘Oh, I don't know,’ it said, doubtfully. ‘About five? Six and a half, maybe?’

The hands put the water down on a shelf, and picked up another bit. This water was a little smaller. The voice paused for a moment, then spoke more confidently. ‘Definitely a two. Two and a third at most.’

The hands placed this second piece down on top of the first. The two bits of water didn't meld, but remained distinct. One hand moved out of sight and there was a different sound then, a soft metallic scraping. That's when I got my first twitch.

Stratten noticed. ‘Getting warmer?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, leaning to get a closer look at the console. The point of view had swivelled slightly, to show a battered filing cabinet. One of the drawers was open, and the hands were carefully picking up pieces of water – which I now saw were arrayed all around, in piles of differing sizes – and putting them one by one into different drop files. Every now and then the voice would swear to itself, take out one of the pieces of water and return it to a pile – not necessarily the one it had originally come from. The hands started moving more and more quickly, putting water in, taking water out, and all the time there was this low background noise of the voice reciting different numbers.

I stared at the screen, losing awareness of the office around me and becoming absorbed. I forgot that Stratten was even there, and it was largely to myself that I eventually spoke.

‘Each of the pieces of water has a different value, not based on size. Somewhere between one and twenty-seven. Each drawer in the filing cabinet has to be filled with the same value of water, but no-one told him how to figure out how much each piece is worth.’

The screen went blank, and I turned my head to see Stratten smiling at me. ‘You remember,’ he said.

‘That was the dream I had just before I woke up. What the fuck's going on?’

‘We took a liberty last night,’ he said. ‘The proprietor of the hotel you stayed in has an arrangement with us. We subsidize the cost of his rooms, and provide the consoles.’

‘Why?’ I reached unthinkingly into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Instead of shouting at me or pulling a gun, Stratten simply opened a drawer and gave me an ashtray.

‘We're always looking for new people, people who need money and aren't too fussy about how they get it. This is the best way we've found of locating them.’

‘Great, so you found me. And so?’

‘I want to offer you a job as a REMtemp.’

‘You're going to have to unpack that for me.’

He did. At some length. This is the gist:

A few years previously someone had found a way of taking dreams out of people's heads in real time. A device placed near the head of a sufficiently well-off client could keep an eye out for electromagnetic fields of particular types, and divert the mental states of which they were a function out of the dreamer's unconscious mind and into an erasing device. The government wasn't keen on the idea, but the inventors had hired an attorney trained in Quantum Law, and no-one was really sure what the legal position was any more. ‘It depends’ was as near as they could get.

In the meantime a covert industry was born.

The obvious trade was in nightmares, but they don't happen very often, and clients balked at buying systems which they only needed every couple of months. They'd only pay on a dream-by-dream basis, and the people who'd developed the technology wanted more return on their investment. Also, nightmares aren't usually so bad, and if they are, they're generally giving you information you could do with knowing. If you're scared crapless about something, there's often a good reason for it.

So gradually the market shifted to anxiety dreams instead. Kind of like nightmares, but not usually as frightening, these are the dreams you get when you're stressed, or tired, or fretting about something. Often they consist of minute and complex tasks which the dreamer has to endlessly go through, not really understanding what they're doing and constantly having to restart. Then just when you're starting to get a grip on what's going on, you slide into something else, and the whole cycle starts again. They usually commence just after you've gone to sleep – in which case they'll screw up your whole night – or in the couple of hours before waking. Either way you wake up feeling tired and worn out, in no state to start a working day when it feels like you've already just been through one.

Anxiety dreams are much more frequent than nightmares, and tend to affect precisely the kind of middle and high management executives who were the primary market for dream disposal. The guys who owned the technology changed their pitch, rewrote the copy in their brochures, and started making some serious money.

But there was a problem.

It turned out that you couldn't just erase dreams. That wasn't the way it worked. Over the course of eighteen months the company started getting more and more complaints, and in the end they worked out what was going on.

When you erase a dream, all you destroy is the imagery, the visuals which would have played over the dreamer's inner eye. The substance of the dream, an intangible quality which seemed impossible to isolate, remains. The more dreams a client has removed, the more this substance is left behind: invisible, indestructible, but carrying some kind of weight. It hangs around in the room the dream has been erased in, and after thirty or so erasures it gets to the point where the room becomes uninhabitable. It's like walking into a thunderstorm of competing subconscious impulses – absolutely silent but impossible to bear. After a few weeks, the dreams seem to coalesce still further, making the air so thick that it becomes impossible to even enter the room at all.

Unfortunately, the kind of client who could afford dream disposal was exactly the type who was turned on by litigation. After the company had swallowed a few huge out-of-court settlements on bedrooms which were now impassable, they turned their minds to finding a way out of the problem. They tried diverting the dreams into storage data banks, instead of just erasing them. This didn't work either. Some of the dream still seeped out of the hard disks, regardless of how air-tight the casing.

Then finally it clicked. The dreams weren't being used up. Maybe if they were …

They gave it a try. A client's transmitting machine was connected to a receiver placed near the bed of a volunteer, and two anxiety dreams were successfully diverted from the mind of one to the other. The client woke up nicely rested and full of vim, ready for another hard day in the money mines. The volunteer had a shitty night of dull dreams he couldn't quite remember, but was paid for his troubles.

No residue was left in the room. The dream was gone. The cash started flowing again.

‘And that's what you did to me last night?’ I asked, a little pissed at having my mind invaded.

Stratten held up his hands placatingly. ‘Trust me, you'll be glad we did. People have varying ability to use up other people's dreams. Most can handle two a night without much difficulty, three at the most. They get up feeling ragged, and drag themselves through the day. Usually they only work every other night – but they still make eight, nine hundred dollars a week. You're different.’

‘How's that?’ I knew this was most likely a stroke, but didn't care. They didn't come along that often.

‘You took four dreams last night without breaking sweat. The two you've just seen, and another two – one of which was so boring I can't bear to even watch just the visuals. You could probably have taken a couple more. You could make a lot of money.’

‘How much is a lot?’

‘We pay according to dream duration, with additional payments if they're especially complex or tedious. Last night you erased over three hundred dollars' worth – and that doesn't factor in a bonus for the dullest one. Depending how often you worked, you could be earning between two and three thousand dollars. A week.’ He closed the pitch. ‘And we pay cash. Dream disposal is still in an unstable state with regard to legality, and we find it more convenient to obfuscate the nature of our business to some of the authorities.’

He smiled. I smiled back.

Three thousand dollars is an awful lot of bar tending.

It wasn't a difficult decision.

I signed a non-disclosure contract. I was leased a receiver, and had it explained to me. Basically I could go anywhere in the continental United States, as long as I kept the machine within six feet of my head while I was asleep. I didn't have to go to bed at any particular time, because the dreams booked to me were just spooled into memory. As soon as the device sensed I was in REM sleep it fed the backlog into my head. When I got up in the morning my nightwork would be there on the screen like a list of email messages: how long the dreams had been, when they started and finished, and whether they qualified for bonus payment or were just hack work.

And at the bottom of the list, the good news. A figure in dollars. I found I could take six or seven dreams a night without too much difficulty. Some days I'd be groggy and find it difficult to concentrate on anything more complex than smoking, but when that happened I'd just take the following night off.

After six months I was recalled to REMtemps' offices and asked if I'd like to volunteer for a higher proportion of bonus dreams. I said ‘Hell, yes’, and my earnings took another jump upwards. I met a hacker called Quat in the Net, and hired him to write me a daemon which would circulate my earnings around a variety of virtual accounts: every now and then the IRS or some other ratfink would close in on one of them, but when that happened I'd just swallow the loss and keep the rest of it on the move. I also paid him a lot of money to erase a particular incident from the LAPD's crimebank, which meant I could go back to California.

It was a good life. I travelled from place to place, this time as a person with money instead of someone looking for a score. After a while it came to seem natural to wear better clothes, to head for the upscale hotels. I got used to the other things that money gets you, like a modicum of respect, and bed companions who don't issue you with an invoice in the morning. I kept in touch with the few people I cared about through the phone, the Net and occasional flying visits. I dropped in on Deck in LA a couple times, and the city began to lose its darkness for me. I began to think of moving back there, of letting it be my place once again.

There were occasional downsides. Boredom. The exhaustion which came after a night full of bonuses, and the emotional flatness from being forever on the move and never having a relationship which lasted longer than a few days. There were periods when I'd go a little weird, and I came to realize that was because I'd spent so many nights having other people's dreams that I hadn't had time for any of my own. When that happened I'd clock off, let my mind catch up and do the subconscious boogie. After a few days I'd be fine again.

I'd found some action which was safe, which I was good at, and which paid big-time money.

That should have been enough.

Then five months ago I got a call from Stratten. It came very early in the morning, and I was crashed out in a king-sized bed on the top floor of a hotel in New Orleans, the debris of a hard evening's pleasure spread all around me. By then I was back more or less full-time in LA, and had an apartment in Griffith which I called home. I wasn't supposed to hang in one place, however, so I took enough trips out of town to convince REMtemps I was still itinerant.

I couldn't remember the name of the woman beside me, but she was a whizz at answering the phone. By the time I'd realized it was ringing she already had it up out of its cradle and at her ear. When she passed it over to me I sat up, head foggy and full of half-remembered tasks and confusions. I suppressed the urge to look at the receiver to see how much I'd earned. From the way I felt I knew it was going to be considerable.

‘Mr Thompson,’ said that voice, and I instantly became more awake. ‘Who answered the phone?’

‘I don't know,’ I said stupidly. ‘I mean, why? What difference?’

‘I assume she's someone you've met very recently?’

‘Yes.’ I glanced across the room to where the woman was standing. Candy, I think her name may have been, though she may well have spelled it with an ‘i’. At the end, I mean. She seemed nice, and I got the feeling she actually liked me. I was wondering whether she might be interested in hooking up with me for a while. A whole week, maybe, until I went back to LA. At that moment she was making coffee with no clothes on, and I was hoping Stratten would stop talking soon.

‘You met her last night, correct?’ he asked. I admitted that was the case. ‘And she's in your hotel room. But she answered the phone after a single ring.’

I took a sip from the beer bottle by the bed. ‘So?’

‘Think about it.’

I watched as Candy stirred just the right amount of sugar into my coffee. I got what he was driving at. ‘Don't talk shit,’ I said. Candy winked at me and slipped into the john.

‘Get rid of her and come to the office,’ Stratten said. ‘I have a proposal for you.’ The line went dead.

I got out of bed and put the dream receiver in my bag. The readout said I'd earned over a thousand dollars. I got dressed, and when Candy came back out, spruced 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.

Three

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 found itself in the wrong video game, with no instructions.

I sympathized, just for a moment. I felt pretty much the same way.

‘That's her, isn't it?’ said the clock, who was standing on the counter next to my cooling cup. I'd let it ride back with me in the car to LA. It seemed only fair.

I nodded. ‘I owe you one.’ The clock had refused to tell me how he'd known where the woman was, saying it was a timepiece secret. I'd get it out of him sooner or later, but for the time being it didn't really matter. I'd found her.

I stayed put for a while, in case the flunky I'd talked to in the hotel forgot the fifty I'd laid on him and told the woman someone was looking for her. When five minutes had passed without incident I slipped off my stool, stumbling slightly. I leaned on the counter for a moment, blinking rapidly and waiting for my head to clear.

The clock looked up at me dubiously, still dabbing the mud off itself with a napkin and glass of water I'd acquired for it. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Just watch me,’ I said, not really knowing. My first plan was to simply talk to her. Tell her that what she'd done was bad, and get her to take the memory back. I'm an eternal optimist. If that didn't work, then it was going back into her head by force. Either way, she was coming with me. I had to get her in the same room as my receiver, and get hold of a transmitter from somewhere – hence my call to Quat. If she needed persuading, I'd use the gun, but I wasn't going to pull it out in this diner. The homeboys holding up the counter all looked far tougher than me: one flash of my piece and my guess was they'd be packing bazookas. If they were on contract I'd probably be okay, but if they were freelance they might just whack me speculatively and see if anyone was interested in paying after the fact. The sad thing about my life is that some people might well be. I slipped the clock in my pocket, left a couple of dollars by my cup, and left.

It was cold outside, and I took a second to lay a perfunctory curse on the head of a certain production company. Couple years ago they were shooting Northern Maine on the Mitsubushi lot, and couldn't be bothered with all the sprinklers and wind machines and stuff. So they got permission to change the microclimate for the afternoon instead. It got fucked up, naturally, and now you can never tell what the weather's going to be like. It's even more like living inside a madman's head than it used to be, but the movie went over big in Europe, so nobody likes to complain.

I jogged across the street, keeping my hands in my pockets and my head down, just part of the scenery, someone wanting to get someplace out of the rain. Up at the next corner I saw a car had been pulled over, police vehicle angled just ahead of it. Two guys stood with their hands on the hood, legs spread. One of the cops was methodically stamping on something on the floor, and I relaxed. Just a routine cigarette bust.

The hotel's foyer was quiet and dimly lit. A few plants lolled listlessly in pots around the walls, and the floor seemed fairly clean. It was one of those places where you wonder what the point of it is: not expensive enough to be worth going to on purpose, not sufficiently cheap to be the only place you could afford. Just part of the string of islands that salesmen and other salaried itinerants hop between, every room sanitized and bible-positive for their protection and comfort. I've stayed in a million such places myself, and they're like their own little country. Drab, anonymous suites; staff bored out of their tiny minds; the restaurant populated each night only by a scattering of men of uncertain ages, sitting at tables by themselves. Hair damp from a shower after a long day's drive, jeans with a crease ironed in, staring into the middle distance as they chew, their eyes dull from a preliminary check on what will be on the porno channels later on. I was always somehow surprised that such hotels didn't have their own graveyards out back, that their customers were evidently allowed to rejoin normal society after they'd finally had their coronaries.

The flunky I'd leaned on was nowhere to be seen, but that was okay. If I had to come back this way with a struggling woman in tow, I needed as little external input as possible. Laura Reynolds had a room on the second floor, so I took the stairs. It doesn't do to make elevators feel too important. More plants lurked at each bend in the staircase, suspiciously still, as if they'd been gossiping with each other only seconds before.

The corridor was long and quiet. I stood outside her room for a few moments, but couldn't hear anything inside. I realized then that I should have cornered the flunky after all, got a copy of the key to her room in case she refused to let me in. Probably he would have raised some footling objection, but I'm an old hand at dealing with that kind of thing. Used to be, anyhow. That I was out of practice was demonstrated by the fact that I'd completely forgotten about the whole issue of entry to the room. Sure, you can kick the door down, but it's not as easy as it looks and tends to be hard on the feet. Also it makes a shitload of noise, which is seldom desirable. Muttering irritably, I turned the handle anyway, already reconciled to tramping back down the stairs and making a nuisance of myself.

The door was on the latch.

I stood very still for a moment, waiting for the shouting to start. It didn't. So I carefully pushed the door open.

Inside was the usual stuff, the unnatural flora of mid-range hotel rooms. The corner of a bed. A battered dresser, with an old-looking teleputer squatting at the end. Beyond, a circular table with a lamp, and a pile of pamphlets that could only be invitations to the local attractions. Whatever the hell they were supposed to be. I still couldn't hear anything, not even the tuneless humming or occasional sighs most people feel obliged to undertake when alone, to smooth the quietness out.

I stepped into the little corridor, and closed the door quietly behind me. On my right was an open closet, with a few dresses on those hangers designed not to be stolen, presumably on the assumption that people paying seventy dollars a night for a room make a point of stealing a dollar's worth of coat hangers everywhere they go. Why would they do that? The next hotel's going to have its own stock, isn't it? And it means you can't use them to hang a shirt in the bathroom while you shower, which is as close to ironing as I ever get.

I took a cautious step into the main room. The door to the bathroom was shut, and I heard a faint splashing sound.

I let go of the gun in my pocket, and took a look around the room. A small suitcase lay open on the second bed, the interior a jumble of good underwear. A bottle of vodka stood on the bedside table, already missing about a third of its contents. Other than that she had made as little dent on the room as a ghost that walked especially lightly and tidied up as it went. A bedside combined clock-and-teamaker was staring at me with wide eyes, but I held my finger up to my lips and it remained silent.

I padded back to the door, and locked it. Then turned to the closet, took the dresses off their hangers with hardly any struggle at all, and folded them fairly neatly into her bag. I zipped it up, poured myself a smallish drink, and sat in the armchair to wait. Chances were she'd come out wrapped in a towel – most people do, even when they're alone. If not, I'd avert my eyes. I wasn't going to just charge straight into the bathroom. I try to be polite, and a few minutes' grace would help ensure the cops were gone from the corner outside.

I beguiled the time reading the hotel's literature, learning at some length of the management and staff's yearning to fulfil my every need. Probably they actually meant the person who was paying for the room, but I scrawled a note on the suggestions sheet anyway, asking for some proper coat hangers. I also discovered that the tariff included a complimentary continental breakfast, which annoyed me, as usual. Continental breakfast? Continental shit, more like. You sleep for eight hours, traverse great Jungian gulfs of unconsciousness, and what do they offer you on re-entry to our dread prison-world?

A croissant.

I mean, what? No sausage? No eggs, no fucking hash browns, even? What use is a croissant to anyone, especially first thing in the morning? And yet everybody sits there picking at it, pretending it's food, despite the fact that they would never eat it at home. Hotels around the world have seized on the continental breakfast not because it has any value, or because it's what anyone wants, but because it's cheap and requires no effort. If a hotel offers a complimentary continental breakfast, what they're really saying is: ‘There is no proper breakfast.’ Or: ‘There is, but you have to pay for it.’

When I realized I was on the verge of shouting I put the menu to one side and just waited instead.

After the meeting in Stratten's office life carried on pretty much the same, superficially at least. I could still go more or less where I wanted, though I took more care to cover my tracks. I gave up the one-night stands, with very little regret. If the only way you can feel alive is with a novel breast in your hand, you're not doing either of you any good. I closed out all my old credit cards, and got new ones under fake IDs. I worked maybe one, two nights on dreams, just to keep my hand in, then a couple of times a week I'd get a call and be told to be somewhere secluded, with my new machine, at a particular time. I had to let them know exactly where I was, because memories have greater weight than dreams and can only be transmitted somewhere specific, but I made sure I was on the road again an hour later. I also made sure I was alone at the moment of transferral, because when you're giving or receiving memories your mind's wide open, and it wouldn't take much for someone to implant a little suggestion there.

A momentary blackout, and then a part of someone else's life was in my head. Sometimes the fragments were as long as a few hours, but generally they were much shorter. I kept them for an afternoon, a couple of days, a week at the most, and then a similar session would take them away again.

Most of the memories were straightforward. I was never told why a client was leaving them with me, but it was pretty easy to guess. Once a week a guy would lose the fact he was married, so he'd feel less guilty while he was spending the afternoon with his mistress. An executive would obscure an object lesson his mother had given him about morality, so as to make fucking over a colleague a little easier. A woman would forget something harsh she said to her little sister, minutes before a car mounted the kerb and killed her, just so as to find a little peace.

Adolescent experiments with people of the same sex. Financial indiscretions. Sticky afternoons with borderline-legal prostitutes. The usual trivia of sin.

Others were stranger. Fragments, like a cat walking along a wall, jumping safely to the ground, and then turning a corner and disappearing. A girl's face, laughing, with branches moving gracefully in the wind overhead. The sound of a stream gurgling past an open window in a bedroom at night. I never got any context, just those little pieces of remembrance, and had no way of working out why someone might pay five large ones for a holiday from them.

It was kind of weird to spend an afternoon, once a week, convinced I had married someone called David, but I'm a fairly together guy and realized it wasn't likely I would forget something like that if it had really happened. Some of the dumps contained strong elements of their owners' more general personality: little parallel universes, sideways glimpses of other possible lives and fates. But most of the memories were already used to being shunted to the side, and didn't really mess me up. I hemmed them in with enough self-awareness to undermine the truths they purported to tell, and after the allotted time the client took them back, and they were gone from my head. I could remember what it was that I briefly held a memory of, but there was no confusion. I could tell, once it had gone, what was my experience and what had been someone else's.

I don't know if there were any side effects. Maybe a few. I found myself getting tired more easily, and misbehaving less, but that could have been any number of things. I'd been on the road too long. Maybe the time was coming when I needed to settle down again. Doing that would mean giving up the memory and dream work, because a stationary target would be easy for the Feds to find. I knew that what I did was harmless, but they'd be likely to see it another way. I didn't know if I was ready to stop earning this kind of money yet, and I didn't know whether Stratten would let me. Also there was the small question of who I'd settle down with. I had good friends in LA, like Deck, but nobody significant of the opposite sex. There hadn't been anyone like that, if the truth be known, for over three years. Most men, in their heart of hearts, believe that there's something that they can do, some change that can be made in their lives, which will help them find that special person. Find as many of them as possible, in fact, especially ones with cute bisexual friends. For me it was travelling around, but I was only looking for one. The one for me. I guess I believed that if I kept on moving, sooner or later, in some unregarded burg in the middle of nowhere, I'd turn a corner and find her – that person who'd always been looking for me too. It was my version of the trail that must start somewhere, I suppose. I also suspected that I'd already had that person, and that the trail had stopped there.

So I carried on, caretaking pieces of other people's lives, and wishing that once in a while someone would lend me a good memory for a change. I toyed with a little smack every now and then, just to dull the noise of other people's bad times in my head. I discovered what it was like to be someone else, and found myself even less inclined to own a gun. I got occasional headaches, bad enough to put me on the bench for a few days.

But for the most part it was okay, and if I needed a reason, I just watched the money flowing into my account.

Until three days ago, it had all been going fine.

I should have worked it out a lot sooner. The suite door left unlocked was a big clue, if nothing else, and I knew better than anyone what it was like inside her head. But I had no reason to expect her to do something stupid – had good evidence to think otherwise, in fact.

After about ten minutes I stood up and hung outside the bathroom door. Sure, women can spend untold amounts of time in the tub, but three o'clock in the morning is rarely the chosen time. They usually save that kind of indulgence for when you're already late for going out. I was prepared to be accommodating, because I know how important feeling clean can be, but I really didn't have time for this. The cops outside would be long gone, and I wanted to move. I had to talk to people, make arrangements. My head seemed to be fairly stable, but that wouldn't necessarily last. I also wanted to check the news.

Then I realized what was missing. I leaned my head close and listened. There was no sound now, no humming, not even the smallest swish of water being moved by a desultory hand. I tried the door. It was locked.

I kicked it down.

Laura Reynolds was lying in a tub of cooling water, still wearing her panties and bra. The rest of her clothes were folded neatly on the toilet seat. Her head had flopped across onto her shoulder, and her eyes were closed. Her sharp, pretty face had gone smooth and still. The water was red, and there was blood all over the tiled floor. Her skin was white, lips blue.

I started moving very fast.

I yanked the plug out the tub, grabbed a couple of hand towels from the rail. Her right arm was lolling just under the water. As I pulled it up I saw that the cut wasn't as deep as it could have been, and that she'd missed the major tendons. I wrapped it tightly in the towel and hung it over the edge of the tub, then reached across for the other arm.

The cut there was a lot deeper, probably the opening slice. Though maybe not: could be the weaker cut had been the first, and when she'd seen the tunnel open in front of her had decided she might as well run down it as fast as she could. Blood was still slicking out of the wrist in major quantities, and once the towel was round it I saw this wasn't going to be enough. Hot water and alcohol had thinned her blood, and it was eager to come out and play. A hotel dressing gown hung on the back of the door, and I tugged the belt out and tied it tight round her upper arm. She stirred then, for the first time, one of her eyelids flickering like some bug's sluggish wing.

Bracing myself with one foot on the other side of the tub, I leaned forwards and tried to pull her up. Though slim, she was about as easy to manoeuvre as the hotel, and I nearly pitched forward onto my face. Eventually I got her slumped against the back wall, and held her there while I grabbed the gown and wrapped it round her shoulders. I tried getting her arms through the holes, but it was too difficult and I didn't want to dislodge the towels. In the end I just tipped her over my shoulder and carried her into the bedroom.

She moaned quietly as I lay her on the bed, but made no sign of moving. I re-opened her suitcase, grabbed a few handfuls of clothes and pushed them into the pockets of my coat. Then I hauled her back over my shoulder and carried her out into the corridor. A quick look either way told me no-one was about, which was good, because this was going badly enough as it was. It didn't even occur to me that I should have looked for her purse until the elevator doors had shut behind me, and at that point I decided she'd just have to live without it.

I was halfway across the lobby downstairs when I heard an exclamation behind me. I turned unsteadily – unconscious bodies are difficult to manage – to see the flunky staring at me open-mouthed, hand already reaching for the phone.

‘Private joke,’ I said.

The flunky eyed the blood-soaked towels. ‘Excuse me?’

‘She's a heavy sleeper. Sometimes I just come along and take her somewhere weird so when she wakes up she wonders where the hell she is.’

‘Sir, I don't believe you.’

‘Does this help?’ I asked, pulling my gun out and pointing it straight at his head.

‘Very amusing,’ he said, and his hand crept back to his side.

‘Keep laughing for a while,’ I suggested. ‘Or I'll come back and explain it again.’

I lurched around the corner to where I'd parked the car, and laid Laura Reynolds across the back seats. Then I got in and drove away, knowing that if I didn't get her to a doctor within a very short time my life had just got even worse.

As I two-wheeled onto Santa Monica Boulevard I nearly totalled us both, swerving to avoid a small group of chest freezers making their way across the road. I could have just driven straight at them, but I make a policy of not tangling with white goods. They're really heavy.

When we were safely heading in the right direction I called Deck. It took him a while to understand what I was saying, but he agreed to do as I asked. Then I flipped the phone to the Net and tried Quat again. It rang and rang, but there was still no answer. I frowned, cut the connection, redialled. Okay it was late, but Quat was always up, and whenever he was awake he was in the Net. Still no answer.

I left it on callback with a redirect to the apartment, and concentrated on the road as we crossed Wilshire and into Beverly Hills. You should know that I'm not a big fan of driving. Never have been. I realize this undermines me in the view of any red-blooded American, but so be it. Lot of people still bemoan the fact that kids spend all their time in computer games: I say it's the only thing that's going to prepare them for real life. Driving equals long stretches of boredom, during which lunatics will randomly pop up and try to kill you – interspersed with pockets of hell where absolutely everything is out to get you. They call these pockets ‘cities’, and they're best avoided unless you happen to live there. Give me a fist fight in a bar, and I'll hold my own. Send me round the beltway at rush hour – fuck off. I'll take a cab. Or walk.

I glanced back at Laura Reynolds continually as I drove, and after the turn onto Western pulled over to get a proper look at her. She was still breathing, but the rise and fall of her chest was shallow. The blood round the cut on her right arm was congealing nicely, but the other still looked wide open. I loosened the tourniquet for a moment, then re-tightened it before setting off again. I really hoped Deck got hold of Woodley, or I was fucked. The only alternative was taking her to a hospital, in which case I'd lose her. I couldn't stand guard the whole time, and she'd already proved she was determined to escape one way or another.

When I turned off Los Feliz I was happy to see there wasn't much of a queue for entry into Griffith. There's only twenty entrances around the entire district, and at certain times of day it can be a complete pain in the ass. As we approached the wall I saw a knot of armed guards peering in the direction of the car, and was pleased to note that even at this advanced hour they were working for the inhabitants' protection.

In 2007 someone decided that Griffith Park wasn't operating to its full potential. They felt the whole ‘park’ thing, in fact, was a little bit twentieth century. It was all very well having a huge open space with a couple of golf courses and areas for boy scouts to tramp around, but there were other uses the land could be put to. Up-scale residential, for example. The nice areas of LA were pretty full by then, and the well-heeled craved new Lebensraum – especially after plate analysis revealed that, come the next quake, Brentwood was going to end up in Belgium. There was a pitched battle with the local history fanatics and the poorer people who liked having a place to barbecue, but the problem with those guys is they don't have much money. The developers did. They won, more or less. A solution was reached.

An area was marked off, bordered by the Ventura and Golden State freeways in the North and East, and Los Feliz in the South. A hundred-metre wall was built along this entire stretch, and along the boundary with Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the West, creating an entirely closed area. The exterior of this wall was painted with high-resolution LED, and the whole surface was wired into a central computer. Certain interior features, like Mount Hollywood and small areas of the old wild lands, were left untouched. Even the developers realized the Hollywood sign was inviolate. This, along with stored images of how the park used to be before the development, was seamlessly displayed on the videowall – creating the illusion that nothing was there. From wherever you stood in LA, you could still see the sign, and the Hills and park to the North East. Unless you walked right up to the wall and punched it – which the guards were there to prevent you from doing – the illusion was perfect. It was like nothing had changed.

Inside the district the same idea was deployed in reverse, with views of Burbank, Glendale and Hollywood constantly updated right up to the sky. LA got a whole new district, but kept the same view, and access tunnels leading from the outside to the three preserved areas even meant that there was technically still a public park. The environmentalists were a bit pissed about the whole thing, claiming this wasn't the point, but they never have any money at all and weren't even invited to the meetings.

As we approached the gate – a ten-by-six-foot hole in the otherwise flawless panorama – I laid my finger over the sensor in the dashboard. This relayed my name, genome and credit rating to the matrix built into the car's shell, for reading by the entrance computer. The matrix was treble-encrypted with a top-of-the-line government DES algorithm, and thus had probably taken someone a good twenty minutes to crack. I simply don't believe that all the people you see driving round Griffith have the money to live there. Particularly those who hang around my block.

I passed, and was allowed through the barrier. The outer doors shut behind me, leaving me in the access tunnel through the wall. The car hummed as it was conveyed towards the inner door. At the end the doors opened gracefully, and I drove out into the world again.

I locked the car to Griffith's auto system and told it to get me home as quickly as possible.

On the inside Griffith looks like it was designed by someone who took acid in Disneyland. The hills provide perching space for split-level houses of high cost and loveliness, but the rest is wall-to-wall fun. The valley areas are split up into regular grids of stores and restaurants, and you're never more than five minutes' drive from a Starbucks or Borders or Baby Gap, the building blocks of Generica. Extensive areas are pedestrianized, and each storefront has been built up into an hysterical shout of commerciality. Restaurants in the shape of food and stores in the style of their products: the shoe stores look like shoes, the video stores are thin and rectangular, and Herbie Crouton's – where the owner, Herbie, sells over two hundred different flavours of small cubes of toasted bread – looks like an enormous crouton. You don't even have to be literate to know where to shop: the perfect, post-verbal landscape. There's a spanking new subway, complete with designer graffiti, a cluster of big hotels in the middle, and little enclaves of speciality shops nestling in the canyons. Nothing is older than ten years, and even the smog is artificial and guaranteed free of pollution.

It's trashy, superficial, and vacuous. I call it home.

When the car turned into my square I took it off auto and drove it myself. I can get all brave when the parking lot is in sight. My building used to be one of the flashest hotels in the area, but then one day someone decided that two hundred yards down the way was far cooler. Everyone checked out of the Falkland virtually overnight, some even carrying their suitcases by themselves. Within a week it was abandoned. By the time I opted for having a stable place to hang my hat, it had applied for and been granted ‘characterful’ status – then turned into private apartments. A SWAT team of interior decorators was called in to make the place look run-down. They did quite a good job, but if you rub hard on the walls in the apartments you can tell the grime's just colour-wash, an environmental laughter track.

I let one of the building's regulars valet-park my vehicle, as always mentally waving it goodbye. I could afford a collapsing car now if I wanted, but I don't really trust them. I've heard too many stories about people who've slipped one into their pocket, popped into a restaurant for some lunch, and then found the car re-expanding at the table. The last thing you want when you're halfway through your tagliatelle is two tons of vehicle on your lap.

Laura Reynolds was still unconscious but also still alive, and I hauled her over my shoulder and hurried into the building. The whole of the first floor has become a kind of freak show bazaar, a throng of fun-seekers and working girls – with a constant backdrop of noise coming from a hundred different stalls. At first glance it looks kind of cool, in an ‘If you are over forty this is your worst nightmare’ kind of way, but take my advice: the drugs are generally cut to shit and you don't want to tangle with the girls. Most of them are method prostitutes: the nurses carry catheters, the meter maids give you tickets enforceable by law, and the schoolgirls like terrible bands and always come straight from an argument with their mothers. The only highlight is the homeopathic bars, where you can get wasted on just one sip of beer: there's a healthcare firm has ambulances out the back with engines running twenty-four hours a day.

Deck was standing right inside the entrance, looking tense. The anti-smoking laws are even tougher inside Griffith, and it drives him berserk. He was also alone.

‘Where the fuck is he?’ I said, heading straight for the elevators on the other side of the foyer.

‘On his way.’ Deck held his arm out to keep the doors open as I manoeuvred into the elevator. Luckily by then I'd remembered my apartment number. ‘He wasn't exactly awake when I called.’ Two guys tried to get in the elevator with us, but Deck dissuaded them. He's a good couple of inches shorter than me, and on the wiry side – but it would be a mistake to read anything into that. His face is a little wonky, but his ease with his scars communicates an entirely valid confidence in his ability to handle himself. He's kept in practice at the whole violence thing, working occasional muscle for local businessmen while holding part-time square john jobs. We made a policy of never working together, back in the old days, but I know that if I ever needed someone covering my back, Deck would be that man.

As we stood outside my door he took Laura from me and held her upright as I fumbled with my keys.

‘You going to explain this to me at some stage?’ he asked mildly.

‘At some stage, yeah.’ I pushed the door open, listened for a moment, then helped Deck drag her in.

Four

We got her laid out on the sofa, and I was halfway through making coffee when there was a buzz at the door. I had my gun out before I knew what I was doing, and Deck held his hands up.

‘Be cool,’ he said, squinting through the peep hole, and kicking aside the small pile of newspapers which had arrived while I was away. ‘Just the old guy.’

Woodley lurched in. ‘I take it you understand this is going to be double rate?’ he rasped, setting his two bags down on the floor. ‘It's nearly four in the morning.’

‘Just shut up and get on with it,’ I said. ‘You'll get four times the rate if you understand that mentioning this to anyone could be fatal. For you, not her.’

Woodley harumphed for a moment, trying to hide a satisfied leer. If there's anything the old berk likes more than money, I can't imagine what it would be. He peered at Laura Reynolds: when he saw the blood-soaked towels he blanched, and waved a hand vaguely at Deck. ‘Let them out, would you, young fellow?’

Though I'd managed to remain relatively calm during the journey home, seeing Woodley dithering around brought it home just how ill Laura Reynolds was. The only time I'd give the old twonk house room was when things were close to the edge. I grabbed one of his bags and shoved him in front of me towards the main bedroom. Meanwhile Deck opened the other bag and let the remotes out – small crab-like machines, the size of tarantulas. Attracted by the smell of blood, they clambered straight up onto the sofa, and started nosing around.

Deck and I had used Woodley on and off for five years, back in the bad old days. He had once, he claimed, been a telesurgeon for covert army operations – conducting surgery remotely through satellite links. There was no way I'd found of establishing whether this was true, but it was certainly the case that he couldn't stand blood. We'd shown him some once, just to check. He didn't mind the sight of it, so long as it was mediated through the remotes' cameras – just didn't like the reality of the actual stuff. After he was court-martialled (unfairly, so he claimed, though he declined to specify what the unfair charges had been) he couldn't get a proper licence, so he hacked out a living catering to people like me. People who every now and then needed something biological sorted out, and who couldn't go to a hospital. Old fool he might be, and I strongly suspected he collected string and slept on the beach somewhere, but boy could that guy stitch. Nicely healed scars in my shoulder, chest and leg – all of which had once been bullet wounds – were testament to that.

I stood where I could see both Laura and Woodley, and watched as he got down to work. The old man's hands were trembling big time, but that wasn't a cause for concern: the controls had anti-shake mechanisms built into them. He put the glasses and gloves on, and within moments the remotes were speeding up and down the woman's arms. After a while one of them hopped off the sofa and delved in the bag, reappearing with a fridgipacked bag of plasma. Woodley clucked and frowned with concentration.

Deck appeared next to me, handed me a cigarette. I fitted a prism filter on the end and lit it gratefully. The filters are a pain in the ass, stealing half the flavour, but it's the only way of smoking indoors without the wall sensors ratting on you. The cigarettes dissolve after use, which is convenient, because possession of them is a misdemeanour. Smoking in LA these days takes more planning than conducting a minor war.

‘So?’ Deck asked.

‘Later,’ I said.

Deck smiled, settled back to watch the remotes. He's a patient man – far more so than me. You could dump Deck in the middle of the Gobi desert, and he'd just look around and say, ‘Is there any beer?’

‘No,’ you'd reply, obviously.

‘Water?’ You shake your head, and he'd think for a minute:

‘Anywhere to sit?’ And he'd walk over to the nearest fairly comfortable rock, and sit there for as long as it took for either beer, water or a parallel universe to appear.

After a while I got fidgety, and checked the answering machine. This works pretty well, considering, hardly ever telling me that 67•0*3∼ has called about the ;,,, t[{+®3, and so I was surprised to see I had no messages. I'd been away for two days. I'm not an especially popular guy, but people tend to ring me up at fairly regular intervals to bug me about something trivial. I experimentally banged the side of the machine.

‘Piss off,’ it said. The machine's been sulking since I threw my coffee machine out. I think they had something going together.

‘Nobody's called?’

‘Since midnight, no. Most people tend to sleep sometimes.’

I stared down at it. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Which was the difficult word?’

‘When did you last give messages?’ I asked, very slowly.

‘11.58 p.m. yesterday.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I remember it clearly. You pressed the button lightly for once.’

‘Problem?’ Deck asked.

I didn't bother to ask the machine if it was sure about the time. If there was any useful cross-breeding that could have taken place in my apartment, it would have been between the answering machine and my alarm clock.

‘Someone's been in the apartment tonight,’ I said.

‘Has been?’

It's not a huge apartment. We checked the few remaining spaces. Deck walked carefully into the second bedroom, tossed the closets and looked under the bed – came out shrugging. I did the same in the main bedroom.

‘Nearly finished,’ Woodley said I passed behind him, expecting me to hassle him. ‘And for your information, she's an occasional user. Smack – but not for a while – and a little bit of Fresh.’

This didn't surprise me. ‘What do I need to do now? Recovery-wise?’ The closets were empty. Nothing appeared to have been taken. You'd have to have pretty specific needs to want to steal something from my bedroom. The memory receiver was still in the closet, and that was all that really mattered.

The old guy shrugged. ‘Don't ask me. Didn't do that bit. Boys I used to operate on were just given a gun and told to go back out again.’

‘You're a doctor, Woodley. You must have some idea.’

He shrugged again. ‘Chicken soup. Keep her off the bottle for a few days. Or give her a stiff scotch. Whichever works. Don't let her go bungee jumping.’

‘Woodley …’ I stopped abruptly, staring at the head of the bed. The sheets and cover had been turned back, very neatly, as if by a maid. It was so unexpected, so bizarre, that I hadn't even noticed it at first. ‘Did you do that?’

‘Like to think I operate a one-stop service, dear boy, but it doesn't extend to making your bed.’

I paid him off, and waited impatiently while he gathered his stuff together. I ran an eye over the living room, and came up empty. Nothing obvious was missing, and trust me – the decor's so austere you'd notice if anything was gone.

When Woodley had left, I grabbed Deck and pulled him through to the bedroom. ‘The bed,’ I said, pointing at it.

‘We've been friends a long time,’ he said gently. ‘But I just don't care for you that way.’

‘Someone's turned back the sheets.’

Deck raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I'm sure. Does it seem something I'm likely to do?’

‘Not unless there was money hidden underneath.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So someone's picked up your messages and turned back the bed. You got an imaginary girlfriend or something?’

‘Not even a real one.’

‘Nobody else got a key? The building's Super, for instance?’

‘The Super is in prison for breaking and entering.’

‘That's a no, then. Anything missing?’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘Okay, so, to recap: someone's broken into your apartment and done a bit of tidying. You're twitchier than a pig in a tin, and you're waving your gun round like a flag. There's a woman on the sofa with wrists like a road map, and you just paid Woodley quadruple rate to keep his mouth shut. Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell me what's going on.’

I took my dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door, and got Laura Reynolds into it. I stuffed the bloody one in the trash where, knowing my housekeeping, it would probably remain for two years. Laura still seemed to be unconscious, but that was probably due to medication: there was a lot more colour in her cheeks, and with a combination of neat stitching and skinFix her arms looked a little better. Now that the blood had been swabbed away you could see both that the cuts were fairly manageable, and that they weren't the first. Old, white lines in very similar places said that tonight's dive for the tunnel hadn't been the first of its kind. Didn't make it any less important for her, I guessed, or any more clever.

I carried her through to the second bedroom as gently as I could, and got her into the bed. I laid a couple of my old coats on top of the bedding, and turned the heating up a little.

Then I went back in the living room and got the answering machine to repeat the messages which someone had already picked up. There were only three, and they were all from Stratten. The first was polite, the second businesslike. The third just said ‘Call the office. Now.’

Time was running out. I got a coffee and told Deck the score.

In the five months I worked memory, Ms Reynolds had been one of my most regular clients. Though I didn't know her name then, she'd dumped the same memory on me six times.

The memory was this. She'd been down by a stream, in a patch of forest behind the house where she lived. I don't know how old she was, but probably early to mid teens. The day was hot and it was late afternoon, and she'd gone into the wood for something important. The main impression I got was of anticipation, and vulnerability, and the memory always made me feel very young. She was standing there, waiting, when suddenly there'd been a shadow over her, and she'd looked up to see her mom. Her mother was a very tall woman, quite thin, with a mass of reddish brown hair. Laura had slowly looked up until she'd found her mother's face. In the memory what she needed a break from every now and then was the expression she saw there. A look of fury – mixed in with a little glee.

The memory always ended abruptly at that moment, and I don't know what the look meant or what had happened afterwards. I'd always been kind of glad I didn't. It was one of the memories I could understand someone wanting to get away from once in a while.

Then last week I came back from lounging round a hotel pool in Santa Barbara to find I had an email message from an address I didn't recognize. Before I even read it I ran a check on the source: sometimes people set their mail to send back a received signal when it was opened. The domain code didn't set any alarm bells ringing, but even so I got the console to hardcopy without technically opening it.

The mail was from this same woman. We'd never been in contact before – all transactions were brokered through REMtemps on a double-blind confidentiality principle – but she mentioned the memory, and I worked out who she was. The message said she had something she wanted me to carry, and would make it worth my while.

I stared at the piece of paper for a few moments, then set fire to it and let it burn in an ashtray. I spent the rest of the day round the pool, and the evening in a bar at the beach end of State Street, playing pool and bullshitting with the locals.

When I got back I had another message from the same address. It listed a phone number. It also mentioned twenty thousand dollars.

I watched a movie on the in-house system for a while, but you know how it is. The back brain makes a decision instantly, and no matter how long you put it off, you know what you're going to do.

At about midnight I left the hotel room and went back to the bar. There was a phone box round the back, out of sight, and I called the number from the message.

A nervous-sounding woman answered the phone. She had me describe her memory in detail. Then she told me what she wanted. She had another memory, one which wasn't usually a problem. Ten years ago she'd gone on vacation with a man she'd just met, to some place on the Baja she'd known for years. Ensenada. They stayed there a while, hanging out, eating seafood, having a good time. Then she'd come back.

‘That's it?’ I asked.

She'd recently met a new man. She liked him a lot. In fact, she was thinking of getting hitched. But they were going to go away together first, just to make sure. He wanted to go to the same town she'd been to with the other man all that time ago. She tried to suggest going somewhere else, but Ensenada had become a kind of lovers' in-joke between them, and it would have looked weird if she'd insisted.

I still didn't see the problem, and said so. As long as you steer clear of some of the taco stands, Ensenada's a cool place to be.

She said she didn't want to go back remembering what it had been like with the other man. She thought it might make her see things differently this time. She really loved this new guy, and didn't want to compromise the trip.

I know it sounds odd, 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 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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