Michael Smith - One of Us

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?’