The Sudden Appearance of Hope

by Claire North

  Waited.

  Three hundred and twenty seconds; less than another hundred and my USB stick would be done.

  Then a voice, speaking English, soft and familiar, and though I was prepared, my breath came fast.

  “Ms Donovan?” Gauguin. Who else but Gauguin? “Ms Donovan, are you there?”

  I pulled a firecracker from my mop bucket, began to tape it round the can of pepper spray.

  “Ms Donovan? Ms Donovan, can you hear me?”

  No point answering, but the flash drive hasn’t finished downloading and I need a little more time.

  “Hello,” I said. “Come in and I’ll shoot things.”

  An over-blown sigh, but perhaps also, a slight breath of excitement? Did Gauguin do excited? “Ms Donovan, there is no way out.”

  Why Ms Donovan? The passports he’d found in my luggage bore a medley of names, but Rachel Donovan was an old, old alias.

  “I think we’ve met before,” he mused, through the half-open door. “It would appear we were in proximity, for a while.”

  “Can you describe my face?”

  Silence from outside. Then, “I have your photo in my hand.”

  “How many times have you looked at it?” Silence, again. “Close your eyes,” I suggested, “see if you can tell me what I look like.”

  Silence. From my mop bucket I pulled the pair of safety goggles.

  “Ms Donovan,” he said at last, “whatever you are, however you manage your… your trick, you are too remarkable for this to be your end. However, I am tasked by Mr Pereyra-Conroy to protect his interests, and protect them I will.”

  Four hundred and sixty seconds.

  Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three…

  “Please – throw the gun down and step out,” he went on, reasonable – but there it was, fear, fear in his voice, fear that I had thought was excitement but no, it is fear, for I am the great unknown, a thing he cannot explain, and Gauguin isn’t excited by such things, but rather, he is afraid.

  Four hundred and seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five.

  On the four hundredth and seventy-ninth second, the USB stick finished downloading the full content of Perfection’s core programming from the servers. It made no sound, there was no change to the room, no computers exploded, no sparks flew. A thing which had been unique was now cloned, and I tied my smart white shirt across my nose and mouth, pulling it tight by the sleeves, as Gauguin waited.

  At last he said, “I saw the footage of you speaking with Dr Pereyra-Conroy at the noodle bar.”

  I picked up the USB stick, taped it to my ankle, pulled my sock over the tape.

  “Her security swore she ate alone, though they watched you the whole time.”

  Baton under one arm, the gun stolen from a fallen guard held tight, a firecracker taped to a can of pepper spray, safety goggles on my face, plastic bag containing the remains of my tools and a pot of yoghurt hooked into my elbow and really, I was starting to run out of limbs, only my legs free, ready to run.

  “I saw you again on the cameras at the party in Dubai, just before the diamonds were stolen. And again, here, in Tokyo, at the 106, exploring the apartments, circling the Pereyra-Conroys. I was there, must have looked straight at you, but it would appear that the connection between the image I have on a screen and the image I see – or rather, fail to see – of your features in my mind is severed. Such a lasting disconnection implies that you have achieved something far more than merely some… temporary magic trick. Dr Pereyra says it is the most exciting thing she has ever heard of in her whole career.”

  Filipa Pereyra-Conroy is one of the most exciting people I’ve met in mine, I muse, but I say nothing now, for he is focusing his words, his attention all on me, lest he forget, making himself a prisoner to the awareness of me, this moment, now.

  Behind me, servers begin to shut down, a slow whine of disappointment, a whimper of breaking parts. Byron14’s USB stick stole a lot of data, but it only needed a few kilobytes’ worth to implant a virus as it committed its crime. It won’t stop them, of course, not a little pissy bit of code, but I think Byron enjoyed the gesture, as the room turns to sudden, fan-washed quiet.

  Silence. I close my eyes, and picture Gauguin nodding to himself, understanding what I’m doing, perhaps caring, perhaps not.

  He said, “Even being forgotten is a modus operandi of its kind.”

  A threat; he just threatened me. With what, precisely?

  Modus operandi: from the Latin, first known use 1654, a way of doing something.

  Abbreviation: MO, used by police forces across the world.

  Other police abbreviations: APB, MVA, CSU, SWAT, FTA…

  Modus operandi, a tool used by police forces to link crimes

  and Luca Evard said, “I promise you won’t be harmed.”

  Here.

  Here.

  Now.

  This moment.

  I am here.

  This space.

  My universe.

  The whole universe.

  Here.

  And Luca Evard speaks.

  and he says, “You don’t have to be afraid.”

  He isn’t here – the past consumed him, left him sleeping on a bed in Hong Kong. The past swallowed the words we had shared, it killed him, the past killed him as surely as it killed his words, as surely as it kills me

  he can’t be here. They can’t have brought him to Tokyo. He sits in perfection still where I left him, waiting for me in a moment frozen in my memory

  He cannot be here.

  And of course, the thief that Hope Arden has become, the professional, knows that he can. Gauguin followed my money, he would have followed my MO, and who waited at the end of that trail? Who was the world expert in the woman everyone forgets, years of his life given to this single purpose?

  Luca Evard, here, now.

  The universe opens and the skies fall, galaxies turn and oceans dissolve away, I think perhaps this moment will last for ever, destroying everything I ever built, erasing the perfect moment in Hong Kong, because look, here we are, here he is, seeing me as a thief, knowing me as a thief, knowing perhaps that I’m something more. Does he know that he has forgotten does he understand what he has forgotten does he suspect does he hate me did he ever love me at all like I loved him

  a professional thief who has my name lights the fuse in the firecracker.

  Gauguin hears it, shouts a warning.

  I throw the firecracker through the door.

  A scurry, a scuttle.

  I close my eyes.

  Nebulas condense into suns; comets lose their endless battle with the force of gravity and burn through the atmosphere of massive worlds.

  The firecracker pops.

  The pepper spray pops with it, a cloud of yellow goo filling the room, bursting into the atmosphere. Through the shirt across my nose and mouth, it burns; no, burn is not the word for it, burn does not pull up your stomach lining, doesn’t make your throat contract. It sears, it sickens, it tastes of swollen tongues spat out whole.

  I step into the room beyond. A yellow, acid cloud swirls in the air, obscuring sight. Fire crackers still burst and hiss, loud enough to shake the eardrums, sparks spitting from their ends, the red stalks hopping up and down on the floor as they fire, flapping, a suffocating fish in a pan. Through the fog of chemicals and smoke, I see six of them, one already on the floor, all smartly dressed. All except Luca – he’s come casually, or as casual as he can be: unironed shirt, trousers a little too short, a hint of black sock rolled up high against his calf, eyes closed tight shut, choking on the fumes in the air.

  I would feel pity for him, but there’s no time for that now.

  The man nearest the door has a gun. My left hand pushes his elbow up, right smashes the baton down as hard as I can on his wrist. These men are blind, but someone fires anyway at the sound, until Gauguin, his hands pressed over his face, cries out no, don’t shoot, you’re shooting blind at us you imbecile!

  His
accent, when he is in pain, isn’t as refined as I thought. There is a hint of something West Country in it, a change in vocabulary, his face is swollen like a pumpkin, and perhaps it is pity

  whatever pity means

  which makes me smash my baton into his knees, rather than his throat.

  Could I kill him now?

  In the busy way of things, it is not an entirely disquieting thought.

  Neither is it very exciting.

  One man, keeping his eyes forced open against the settling yellow cloud, tries to grapple with me. A flailing arm catches at my wrist; with his other he tries to punch me in the stomach, misses. He has power, which he generates by moving his body, arm never extending, but rather legs, chest, hips, coming into my space. Usually that power is devastating; today it is too much, and the momentum of his own punch throws his balance. I smash his arm as it passes me, drive the butt of my baton into his neck, kick his knees out as he begins to fall, and move on.

  One man with a gun left; he doesn’t even know where to point it. I take it from him without a word, without needing to break anything, throw it into the room behind me, pull my own weapon, holler, “Everyone down!”

  “Do as she says,” says Gauguin, wheezing, and was that a hint of Bristol in his accent? Perhaps, but he was fighting it, pulling himself together. “Do as she says,” he repeated, a little more himself, pressing his chest into the ground, and they all did as I said, even Luca Evard, eyes squeezed shut, face a crinkled plastic bag.

  I stood in the middle of a room at my mercy, and thought that this too was a kind of perfection. Perfect thief; perfect control.

  Silence in the room, save for the groans of the injured, one man dribbling thin yellow saliva out of the corner of his mouth.

  I barked, “Are you recording this?”

  Silence.

  “I think you are,” I concluded, looking from Gauguin to Luca and back again. Neither man raised their heads. “I think you have realised that machines don’t forget, even if you do. I want you to listen to the sound of my voice, when I’m gone. My name is Hope. I want you to remember my words. These words are the only part of me that exists. Do not follow. Do not try to find me. Do not forget.”

  I walked to the door, counted my steps, counted my breath.

  Luca, the nearest to the exit, his head turned away, eyes closed tight, lips red, face swollen.

  Words: a cascade of words.

  I felt them on my lips, and sealed my mouth shut.

  I ran.

  Chapter 50

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  Police coming, no way out below, but that was fine.

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  The security office was on the sixteenth floor. I walked in at gunpoint, held three men at bay, shot out the computers, watched the screens go dark, and walked away.

  Me, they forgot, though the bullets would take some explaining.

  A cleaning cupboard on the eleventh floor. I chose it for the ceiling void above; especially large, to accommodate some piece of environmental apparatus they’d never got round to installing.

  I broke into a vending machine and took three bottles of water, two packs of wasabi beans, and a bar of chocolate.

  I lay in the ceiling void, drinking slowly, eating chocolate. I smeared yoghurt onto my face, hands, wrists, neck – anywhere which had been exposed to the fumes of tear gas. I ate the rest, waited.

  An hour.

  Two.

  Three.

  Nine hours.

  A day.

  Time passed, and I waited.

  Police ransacked the building, and no one looked for me.

  I closed my eyes, stayed on my back in the ceiling void, ate a few wasabi beans, needed to go to the toilet, counted to one hundred in the silence and the dark, and waited.

  Time passed, and I waited.

  Waited for memory to fade.

  Wondered where Gauguin was, where Luca Evard was staying.

  A cheap hotel – he always stayed in cheap hotels, even when someone else paid. Was he listening to the sound of my voice, did he have my words on repeat?

  Perhaps he could cheat, write my words down a dozen times, and then a dozen more, and in doing so he would remember the act of writing, and in that way words would survive, even if the link between me speaking them and what entered his memory grew thin.

  I counted to a thousand, and perhaps I slept, and when I woke, I counted to two thousand, and stayed wide awake.

  And when it was done; when I reached twenty-four hours by the clock, I slipped out of the ceiling void, took the stairs down to the sub-basement, smiled at the security guard by the door. My picture, captured by CCTV, was on the wall behind him as I passed by, but his back was to it at that moment, and though he must have studied it all day, its features had faded in his mind, and he smiled at me as I walked away.

  Chapter 51

  My name is Hope.

  I am the queen of the fucking universe.

  I am the best thief ever to walk this fucking earth.

  I am…

  … I am fine.

  I’m…

  … fucking great, just, amazing, I’m…

  … professional.

  Disciplined.

  A fucking fuck-you fuck it all fuck fucking machine.

  Lines of code in a machine, in ascending order:

  Least –

  • Space shuttle

  • Windows 3.1

  • Mars Curiosity Rover

  • Android operating system

  • Windows 7

  • Microsoft Office 2013

  • Facebook

  • Modern internal car software

  – Most.

  Data.

  I sat on a bench, in a place, and stared into nothing.

  I ate food.

  I drank water.

  I walked from a place to another.

  Data only becomes information when it is translated.

  I am

  crying now

  don’t know why.

  This is the thing I am doing but it is not information.

  On the high-speed train out of Tokyo, how did I come to be here?

  I had bought a ticket in advance, an escape route, now I seem to be using it.

  I put Byron14’s USB stick into my laptop, and had a look at what I had stolen.

  Gobbledegook, unintelligible to anyone except an expert.

  The base-code of Perfection.

  Chapter 52

  Parker opened a casino in Macau.

  I watched the announcement on the news, saw him shake hands, smile for the cameras. He was famous now. Everyone knew his name, the one and only Parker of New York.

  Rafe Pereyra-Conroy signed a deal with the royal family of Dubai, to jointly develop an Islamic version of Perfection, extolling virtues worthy of devout people

  virtues such as generosity, kindness, charity, pilgrimage, duty, honour, loyalty, modesty

  modesty codes

  veils for the women

  women not to be seen with unmarried men

  no kissing in public

  rape victims punishable by jail

  etc.

  I thought about turning round, going back to Tokyo, finding Luca Evard, telling him look, look, it’s me, maybe if you arrest me everyone will see that you were right, that you’ve been chasing a forgettable thief, and then you’ll be happy and then you’ll love me, really love me, because I know you would if you could only remember me!

  Sat in Kyoto airport and didn’t move.

  Rolled Filipa’s bracelet round and round my wrist, a journey without end.

  And after a while, because there didn’t seem anything else to do, because nothing else that I did had any meaning whatsoever, I logged back into the darknet.

  whatwherewhy: I have Perfection.

  Byron14: Send it to me.

  whatwherewhy: No. I want to meet.

  Byron14: Unacceptable.

&n
bsp; whatwherewhy: We meet, or you don’t get Perfection. I’ll be in Seoul in three days’ time.

  Byron14: Impossible.

  whatwherewhy: I’ll see you there.

  Chapter 53

  There are two exceptions to the circle of memory loss that surrounds me:

  1. Animals. Perhaps it’s a smell thing? Perhaps if I wore a remarkable perfume people would remember me, nasal déjà vu. Perhaps one day I’ll get a dog. Maybe two.

  2. The old, the ill or the mad. That’s how I met Parker, in the old people’s home in New York, talking to the old ladies and gents. They were used to loneliness, and smiled and put a brave face on it, and that made my condition easier, easier to smile because they did. The old folks never remembered me, save one, who had gently encroaching dementia, who always exclaimed, “It’s Hope! Hope’s come to visit us again!”

  Then I considered becoming a care-home worker, just to be with people who remembered me, but she had no bladder control and didn’t want to eat, not now, not that, that’s disgusting, but I’m hungry! and so I visited her every year at Christmas and Easter instead, until she died, quietly in the night.

  Walking through the streets of Manchester one day, out to rob a jeweller’s. Three months’ preparation, set to go in the middle of the jazz festival, the sound of sax and sousaphone to hide the very small but necessary explosive I’d primed for entry.

  A voice cried out, “Hope!”

  I ignored it, since it hadn’t been my name for so long, but there it went again, “Hope! Stop! I want to see Hope!”

  A woman’s voice, young, shrill and urgent. A kerfuffle, a clatter of metal and rubber, another voice, chiding. I glanced back and there was a girl trying to rise out of her wheelchair, one arm crossed over her body, one side of her face loose from muscular fatigue, but eyes like mine, voice raised high and bright, “Hope!”

  My baby sister.

  I close my eyes and I count

  breath

  steps

  cracks in the pavement

  hairs on my head

  stars in the sky

  And there is my baby sister, Gracie, not grown-up but getting there, twelve, perhaps – no, thirteen by now, thirteen as of three weeks ago – being wheeled along in a little group of girls and boys. She is alert, awake, uncaring for her disability for what is it to her? Just life; whatever. My Grace, and she said, “Hope! Look! We’re going to the station!”