Ian Hocking - Déjà Vu

‘See you later, alligator.’

David surfaced in the interstitial moments, gasping, his vision blurred. The memories of childhood holidays around the beaches of Padstow—deep water—were hard against him. He tried to wipe his eyes but his wrists were bound to his chair. He slumped asleep. Woke again. Slept. Troughs of anxiety. Peaks of fear. David rolled through the minutes.

‘David Proctor,’ said McWhirter, as though distracted by a certain music in his name.

A nurse.

A nurse moved away from David’s arm, where she had stopped to tend something.

To adjust.

A drip.

‘Mc,’ David said. ‘Whirter.’ His voice was crumbly, flawed.

‘That will be all.’

‘What will be?’

‘I’m not talking to you.’

David felt the nurse leave the room. She closed the door with the care of a butler.

‘I feel sick.’

‘The old research centre is not a healthy place to linger.’

‘No, sick of you.’

McWhirter laughed, and David focused on his moustache. Brush-like.

‘Look around,’ said McWhirter.

He was in an empty luggage store. Still in the hotel, then. A blank table separated him from his interrogator. He noted the clear, hanging bag and tried to guess which chemicals it contained, but the only memories at his recall were sentimental. His father painting the house with a brush like McWhirter’s moustache. Two-tone. Black and white. His daughter as a girl, drawing a house on sugar paper.

‘Beautiful, Jenny. Do you think you can draw it without taking your crayon from the paper? Good girl. And can you do it again without tracing the same line twice. Jenny? Hey, clever girl.’

‘How long have I been in here?’

‘Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you come, Proctor?’

‘You invited me as a consultant.’

‘Why? Isn’t there another reason?’

‘To talk to Bruce. To find out why he came. Is he still down there?’

‘Yes. Why?’

Jenny asking, ‘Why?’ and David answering over and over, each explanation a cheerful retreat, until he backed into atoms, to orbits, quarks, the Higgs field.

‘I’ll tell you everything if you’ll tell me one thing.’

‘Let me guess. You want to know if the research centre has been evacuated.’

A sucking, heavy despondency pulled at him. What did McWhirter know? What drugs had they given him?

‘Why?’ asked Jenny.

‘Yes.’

‘Looking for this?’

McWhirter held Ego in his fingers.

‘Fuck.’

‘My security staff found enough explosive in the core of this computer to finish the demolition job on your laboratory. You weren’t happy with the destruction you caused the first time. You wanted a second go. But why this? You would have killed your friend, man.’

‘The Onogoro computer needs to be destroyed.’

‘Listen to me, David. See that drip? You’re on the cusp of irreversible brain damage. You’ll feel the lights going out, one by one. Now. Why destroy Onogoro?’

‘To stop…’

‘Concentrate. Who?’

‘Hartfield.’

‘What does it have to do with Hartfield?’

‘And to kill Bruce.’

‘Bruce is your friend.’

‘Dead anyway. Viruses.’

McWhirter flashed his knuckles across David’s forehead.

‘Wake up. How did you expect to get away with it?’

David licked his lips sleepily. ‘Relied on a weakness.’

‘What weakness?’

‘You.’ David opened his eyes. Woke in this gap between moments. ‘As head of security in 2003, you failed. Now, in 2023, you will fail again.’

‘Talk to me.’

‘You’re a one-trick pony. I knew you would order a fast search of the laboratory, find the card, and wave it in front of me. But think. How could I, above ground, expect to communicate with a computer in the research centre?’

‘A timer,’ said McWhirter.

‘Then why would I ask if the centre had been evacuated? The logical solution, Colonel, is two computers. The Ego unit in your hand has already interfaced with the local ELF transmitter. Now it is ready to trigger the second Ego unit I hid somewhat more expertly. Is this not true, Ego?’

‘Yes, Professor,’ said the card.

McWhirter held his stare. ‘You have control, Proctor. I concede that. Now easy. Think about it.’

‘Get fucked.’

Ego bleeped. ‘Ignition signal transmitted, Professor.’

‘David, you understand that nothing will be the same again?’

‘I understand.’

The explosion came like a croak of thunder. The table buzzed against the metal band of McWhirter’s watch. He did not move his eyes from those of David, and when a uniformed officer returned with news of smoke from the evacuation shaft, McWhirter spoke in his ear before resuming the interrogation.

The minutes collected. David watched the questions pass. They did not touch him. He smiled and remembered the questions of his daughter.

Jenny asking, ‘Why?’

Berlin

The FIB equipment division had given Saskia a standard issue outfit for women field agents: black trouser suit with a short, double-breasted rain jacket. They had thrown in ankle boots. In these, Saskia was now was walking Berlin. With the wind in the north-east, she looked at the Brandenburg Gate and wondered if her memory of passing beneath it was implanted. Greened steel horses looked east. Saskia turned too. Pariser Platz stretched out. A drum skin. Her eyes dropped to a human street cleaner. He was too distant for her to see his epaulettes. She thought, again, of the Soviet memorial to the west.

I know what Soviet means, at least.

I know what meaning means.

The Gate’s sad blocks, its darkness, its gold lettering: these said nothing to her. What did those with memory read in the stones?

Her coat was swept open by the wind. It exposed the dark handle of her gun in its pancake holster. She gathered the coat about her, embarrassed, and walked towards the shadow of the Gate. She collided with a man. He took her wrist and said, ‘ Seien Sie vorsichtig, Frau Kommissarin .’ The Russian accent was strong like his grip. He opened and closed an FIB badge.

‘Klutikov?’

Coffee in a dark, long room where flowers in wire spirals sagged across the tables. Amaretti biscuits. Coffee with her past in the form of an overtall man called Klutikov—FIB, Moscow Station. He had a translucent raincoat. It hung now behind them on an antique coat stand. Saskia’s jacket remained in place. It covered her holster, her speedloader and her shape as a woman before the eyes of the man who could thumb through her identity at will. Coffee with memory. Klutikov licked sugar from his palm.

‘Cigarette?’ he asked.

‘Here?’

‘It’s the only place.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Take one. Draw it beneath your nose. Now. Want a cigarette?’

‘God, yes.’

He laughed as he put the lighter to the cigarette. Saskia saw something important in its golden reflection, but he withdrew it before she could trace the source of her curiosity. The smoke left her mouth slowly. She spread out in her chair.

‘Better?’

‘Sure.’

He showed her his empty palm. Then he touched his fingertips in order: ‘One, no names, ever. Two, after this coffee, you forget you saw me. Three, smile.’

Saskia blushed. She drank some coffee. It was ashy, like the cigarette.

‘Any synaesthesia?’ asked Klutikov.

‘What’s that?’

‘You never need to ask that kind of question again. Ask yourself.’

‘What?’

‘Do it.’

What is synaesthesia?