Excerpt
I WILL FIND YOU, EVEN IN THE DARK
I
The world is static. Lines and waves and noise that crowd your vision like an old VCR, the one where you had to adjust the tracking to get a clearer picture. I found one of those once, a VCR, in an expired man's house. Took it home, cleaned it up nicely, and started the tape that was stuck inside. A home movie played back, one from a time when people had hand-held cameras, when the world had only begun to record their memories.
The man was much younger than how I'd found him. He smiled at the camera, shoving his face into the lens, then ran off into the water behind him, splashing some screaming children. The picture was pixelated but the colours were vibrant—greens and golds and yellows. Colours that didn't exist anymore, not in this neon red landscape. I sat there, watching them play over and over again as though I was the one behind the camera, living this moment with them, this man and these children my own.
What happened to them? To the person behind the camera? To the children? Where were they when I went to this man's filthy apartment, when I scraped what was left of him off the floor, his body left to decompose for months, his chip the only tangible piece left of his withered corpse?
Who knows.
But that's why I was there when no one else was.
It's my job.
II
The call came in early Thursday morning. I was the on-call supervisor, sitting at my desk, flicking through case files and filing reports. I had sent my skeleton crew home to get a decent night's rest before the calamity hit—the requests mostly came later in the mornings, when the sun had risen high enough to rouse the smell of expired bodies. Usually it was the neighbours who called it in, older people crammed like sardines into rundown apartment complexes called Commons. People without family. People biding their time until their bodies expired and the only thing left of them was their chip. People called the unwanted.
As a cleaner, it was my job to be first on the scene after an unwanted was discovered. I'd go in, usually to Sagashi City, a small town designated solely for the unwanted—retirees with no family, no money, people simply waiting for their bodies to be done with them. After removing what was left of the bodies into the organic matter incinerator, lovingly dubbed OMI by my team, we would get to work removing the unwanted's earthly possessions. I'd let my workers pack trinkets, sort through items to be resold, and do some cleaning in the main rooms, leaving the body and any of its leftover stains for me.
I'm sure the kids who worked under me might've thought I was being selfless by taking the worst part of the job for myself, and I certainly didn't correct them otherwise. But if there's one thing I've learned in my thirty-odd years of existing is that no one does anything out of the goodness of their own heart.
And that's why I steal memories.
We all have chips implanted in our skulls, just below the ear. A long time ago, people got tired of carrying around useless items that would only weigh them down, so someone decided, hey, might as well install a port into your brain so you can upload, download, erase, duplicate memories as you please! I'm sure it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it.
Thing is, everyone thought the idea was great. No more lugging around a cellphone. No more owning a computer and having it go blue-screen-of-death on you. No, simply insert a chip into your new port, undergo a slight corneal transplant to access your retina screen, and voila, you can now document your whole life at the blink of an eye.
"Open," I said, digitally signing off on my reports as the neon blue message icon popped up on my retina screen. Next door neighbour called in, complaining of a distinct smell. The landlord got into the apartment and found the body. The woman had expired about a week ago, late 80s, no family to claim her or her belongings.
"Responding: Elena Wasureta, six-oh-five-two," I said, transmitting the message back to dispatch. "Going solo on this one, sent the rest of the crew home."
"Wasureta, six-zero-five-two, confirmed, syncing in now," replied Shonji. She worked at the head office downtown. I had never met her in person, but we sometimes bantered back and forth through the waves.
A solid blue dot appeared at the top corner of my retina screen, letting me know Shonji had linked to my chip, allowing her to record the job. This was common practice these days, your employer accessing your chip and watching your routine. It's how they kept everyone in line.
"Sync confirmed," I replied, flipping myself off. "Hey Shonji, how many fingers am I holding up?"
"Very funny, Elena," she said, dryly. "All looks good on this end, thank you."
"Any day." I stood up from my desk and stretched. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I started gathering my materials, my supplies, from OMI to a mop and bucket. You never knew what exactly you'd encounter on a call, even with dispatch sending you the details.
"Hey, Elena?" Shonji's voice crackled over the static.
"Yeah?"
"Bring extra supplies for this one."
