by Molly Flatt
‘These . . . these things, these pearl things, they’re . . .’ Alex shook her head. She wanted to say they were impossible, but the impossible thing was that she recognized them, as instinctively as she recognized the sight of a human face. She wanted to panic and protest. But then came the calm, the soothing, cradling calm, blanketing all disbelief and fear.
‘The spheres are called Stories,’ said MacBrian. ‘So named because they generate and store our life stories, Miss Moore. Don’t be afraid. We all have one. They’re perfectly natural. Curstag will show you how they work.’
She nodded at Curstag MacRob, who was waiting in the centre of the tower. MacRob nodded back, then shrugged off her cape and dragged her shirt unceremoniously over her head. Beneath it was a sort of grey linen sports bra, a rippling four-pack and the same full-body tattoo Alex had glimpsed, briefly, on the woman in the other tower. It began at her wrists, with matching infinity symbols that sprouted thick, elaborately knotted indigo ropes. The ropes twisted up MacRob’s arms and over her shoulders, crossed between her shoulder blades, curled around her ribs, then docked into a third infinity symbol beneath her diaphragm. It looked like a harness for a sport that Alex was not eager to play. Oblivious or indifferent to their stares, MacRob bent her knees, the figure-of-eight beneath her ribs bulging and shrinking as she breathed deep into her abdomen. She raised her arms and wriggled her fingers like a pianist about to tackle a concerto. Then she positioned her hands above her head and became very still.
Nothing happened for several long seconds. Then, without warning, the skin of one of the ‘Stories’ that was docked near the ceiling ruptured. A swarm of silver sparks burst from the breach into the air. Flashing, darting, rolling, the sparks spread into a glittering canopy across the tower. Alex didn’t realize that she’d raised her arms in a shield, until she felt a hand on her elbow, pulling it down.
‘They can’t hurt you,’ MacBrian said. ‘They’re Memories.’
‘Memories?’ Alex reluctantly lowered her arms as the sparks clustered and shimmered and swooped through the air, too fast to track.
MacBrian nodded. ‘With a capital “M”. These are the originals, created in the moment of experience. They’re the physical records your brain draws upon when you remember. The hard copies, if you will. Some Memories are heavy and rich from having been activated many times. Some lie dormant for years. Some fade instantly, while others gradually lose significance and crumble away. However, the power of Memories does not lie in their individual natures, but in the relationships between them. Now if you watch . . .’
‘You must be out of your . . .’ But Alex’s half-hearted protest faded away as hundreds of ‘Memories’ began to break away from the glittering canopy above their heads. Flocking to the centre of the tower, they clustered into a figure-of-eight loop directly above MacRob. The loop began to whir round, twisting faster and faster until it gave off a mingled yellow-green glow. For the next few seconds the loop’s colour steadily intensified, from pistachio to lime to a burning chartreuse. Then, without warning, the whole thing exploded in a silver spray, scattering its Memories back out across the tower. Moments later, a fresh set of Memories had swarmed out of the canopy and formed another loop above MacRob. When this loop began to spin – more slowly than the last one – it glowed a pale red-brown. It circuited lazily for several seconds, its colour deepening to a rich mahogany rust before it, too, burst apart. And so it went on. Now a wisp of watery blue; now a helix of grey tinged with rose. Then back to the rusty rope again – as if someone had set off a manic firework display in the dark tower.
‘Now those loops,’ MacBrian said, barely glancing at the spectacle above, ‘are Storylines. Patterns made up of Memories. When they join together in particular combinations, our Memories create narratives about who we are. And those narratives, in turn, influence how we behave. When we’re young, we test out and discard dozens of Storylines. But as we get older, certain Storylines stick. These grow stronger and stronger, pulling in more and more new Memories. In this way, over time, our Storylines reduce in number and stabilize. In other words, our narratives about who we are become more predictable, more rigid, and our behaviour follows suit. Now, this isn’t necessarily bad. Some entrenched Storylines continue to be sources of great energy for their owners, for good or otherwise. But others, especially ones underpinned by very old Memories, can become over-dense and sluggish. They start to slow their Stories down, like plaque clogging the arteries. And that’s where we Readers come in.’
She gestured towards MacRob, who was studying the lightshow above, her fingers still poised in the air.
‘I don’t—’ Alex began weakly, fighting the calm, trying to resurrect some rationality. But then MacRob closed her eyes and lifted her hands higher and Alex saw the red-brown loop quiver. Drop an inch. Quiver again. Then it plummeted all the way down through the roiling silver air to cuff MacRob’s wrists. MacRob snatched her fingers into fists. The loop shivered for a second, as if trying to break apart. Then it settled, and held.
‘Miss Moore?’ MacBrian said. ‘Stand behind Curstag, please.’
Her body responded to MacBrian’s order before her brain had a chance to intervene. The calm washed over her, the Storyline called to her and wonder outweighed doubt. Prickling from her scalp to her toes, Alex approached MacRob.
‘It might sting a little at first,’ MacBrian’s voice said, as if from a hundred miles away.
MacRob’s face was perfectly composed, but the muscles in her shoulders were straining and her skin glistened with sweat. As Alex came up behind her, MacRob unfurled her left fist and dipped her forefinger down so that its tip touched the rusty current of light.
‘Put your hands on her back and close your eyes.’
Again, Alex hesitated, trying to question what she was doing, to summon her shattered thoughts, to evaluate. But as the calm flooded her lungs, her mind dissolved into pure sense. She felt the crackle of the current, the heat on her scalp, that visceral smell. And the pull, again. The pull. It knew her. She knew it, too. Alex let out her breath and planted both her palms on MacRob’s slippery shoulder blades.
‘GAH!’ She jumped back, shaking her fingers. ‘What the fuck was that?’ She looked at MacRob, who hadn’t moved an inch.
‘Curstag has Read thousands of Storylines,’ MacBrian said. ‘Hundreds of thousands. All you need to do is relax, Miss Moore. Don’t try to understand. Just let her do the work.’
‘Are you sure you want to go on?’ Taran asked, stepping forward. ‘If you don’t feel quite ready . . .’
But Alex was already closing back in, reaching out.
It wasn’t pleasure. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t sight or smell or sound or touch or taste, but all and none of them at once. It was beyond language, a multisensory data storm of images and emotions and thoughts and ideas. And there was no interface to help her navigate.
His clumsy hands, on the night of his wedding, turning his caresses into battering rams.
His mother calling him stupid boy, with real and terrible rage.
Sitting on the floor of the pantry in the darkness, spooning honey out of a jar.
The eyes of his daughter, which were his wife’s eyes, shouting at him useless man.
His lover’s dark nipples, and the feel of them: electric shame.
Decades raced past in minutes, as Alex was drenched in wave after wave of someone else’s ossified past. Someone else’s life, resurrected in blasts of nerve-flare and muscle-tweak and hormone. Things he had done, things he had said, things his wife and mother and lover had done and said to him. Dreams, paintings, the feeling of his bare feet on soil. The scent of perfume, a particular piece of music, abstract moments of private reverie. It wasn’t remembering, fuzzy, faded and half-felt. It was vivid, urgent, immediate sensory experience – except it belonged to someone else. Some Memories passed through her light and quick. Others snagged and sank, clotted with significance. As the Memories accumulated, the Storyline moved more slo
wly, and Alex began to feel heavy and slow, too. Just as she was wondering how much more she could take, she felt the Storyline pause, then tremble, as if it had snagged. Pause. Tremble. Pause. Tremble again.
Beneath Alex’s hands, MacRob’s back expanded in a long exhale. Her shoulder blades dropped an inch. Another breath, another softening. Again. And again.
And then the one Memory that had been resisting MacRob’s touch gave way and Alex tasted it, a hard little kernel lacquered by sixty years of fear. It was the sight of his grandfather’s face, on the night his grandmother died. The image faded into a moment of perfect stillness. Then, out of the stillness, something blossomed. A meaning, like a single drop of essential oil on her tongue. An I . . . a . . . an I. . . a love . . . love . . . loss . . . my . . .
Someone was gripping her arm, pulling her away. There was a brief and horrific rush of desolation. Then the calm filled the tear and, all at once, it was done.
‘Miss Moore?’
Taran was on one side, peering into her face. MacBrian was on the other, appraising her with a frown. In front of her, Curstag MacRob was rubbing her balled-up shirt over her face. The tower was dim. The cloud of sparks was gone. Alex looked up at the wall. The Story from which the Memories had released had closed over again, its skin flawless and glowing, its precious cargo trapped safely inside. As she watched, it began to slip back through its hollow, returning to the blackness behind the wall. Within a few seconds it had vanished. Except, except . . . yes, there – another silvery orb was already pushing its way out of the blackness, passing through the glass and docking into the same hollow. Another Story waiting to be Read. Another human being’s entire inner world.
Alex felt a moment of pure, free-falling vertigo.
Taran moved a hand towards her, then away.
Alex opened her mouth, then closed it.
‘What was the overall meaning of the Storyline?’ MacBrian asked MacRob.
MacRob pulled her shirt back over her head. ‘Love will make me lonely,’ she said.
The phrase shivered through Alex like a premonition, or a memory, or something between the two.
‘There was resistance to being Read,’ MacRob said. ‘The Storyline was very old. The root Memory that it grew from was strong.’
‘Likelihood that the owner will be able to stop the Storyline from re-forming?’
MacRob shrugged. ‘Ten per cent?’
‘That’s a ten per cent chance that the Story’s owner goes on to permanently disperse that particular Storyline – and the unhelpful narrative it creates within him about who he is,’ MacBrian said to Alex. ‘Being Read kick-starts the process, but it will be up to . . .’
‘Dardan Ismaili,’ MacRob said, picking up her cape. ‘Male. Sixty-five. Kosovan.’
‘ . . . Mr Ismaili whether he takes that opportunity to dismantle the Storyline for good. Unfortunately, once they get established, Storylines are stubborn. Very stubborn indeed.’
Alex stared up at the Stories. There were so many of them, docked into the glass around and above her. So many lives – glowing, waiting, asking. She felt a hand on her arm.
‘The first time is always disconcerting, even for an islander.’ It was Taran, too close, his face bright pink. ‘For an Outsider . . . well. The last time that happened was on Menikuk in 1895. It was part of an experiment by their scholarship department to secretly enlist Outside psychologists. Their very first candidate went quite insane, and unfortunately they were forced to abort the project. Although,’ he added quickly, ‘there’s no reason for that to happen. Physiologically, I mean. Other than shock.’
Alex gazed at the thousands of oversized pearls bulging out of the wall. She looked beyond them to the other distant Stories twinkling in the river of blackness, awaiting their turn. Dizziness battled with calm as the traces of a sixty-five-year-old Kosovan man’s life sparked and dissolved inside her. She closed her eyes and saw red-tinted darkness perforated with thousands of pinpricks of shadow-light.
‘I must say,’ MacBrian’s voice said, ‘you’re behaving very sensibly, Miss Moore. I admit that I was prepared for the worst. Now, if you’re feeling strong enough, we’d like to proceed to I-537 forthwith. There’s a chance that a spot of Reading-by-proxy might have helped your own Story to dislodge.’
Alex opened her eyes. ‘My—’
‘There’s a problem with your own Story,’ MacBrian said. ‘That’s why you’re really here.’ She exchanged a glance with Taran. ‘Well, that and what happened to Director MacCalum.’
10
Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthe
Out of the tower and back in the rain, all trace of calm gone, Alex couldn’t decide whether to laugh or scream. Or throw up. Or all three. Her head was throbbing, her legs were shaking, and her chest felt like it had been scraped out with a spoon.
‘It’ll pass, Miss Moore,’ MacBrian said.
The radiation sickness or the fucking existential crisis? Alex would have bellowed, if she wasn’t too busy freaking out to speak. The worst part was that, beneath the rat-scrabble panic of her mind, every instinct was insisting that what she had just experienced was entirely real. More real, in fact, than anything she had experienced for a long time. You want to know about cognitive dissonance, Chloe? she thought savagely. Try stumbling across the biggest fucking secret on the planet, and see what that does for your psychological fucking discomfort.
‘I-537 is some distance away,’ MacBrian said. ‘We’re going to have to ride.’
Alex, who had been staring at her trainers as if they might suddenly transform into ruby slippers, lifted her head. Each of the heavies who had escorted them to the tower from MacBrian’s office was now mounted on a sodden yellow horse, and Iain was holding three others by their reins. Alex made eye contact with the nearest, which flicked its loo-brush tail and stamped one of its dinner-plate feet.
‘No way,’ she said.
‘I know you must be feeling rather shaken up,’ MacBrian said, ‘but there are seven hundred Stacks here and we need to limit the disruption to our work. You have to understand: you being here is quite as disconcerting for us as it is for you.’
‘Shaken up,’ Alex echoed incredulously. ‘Shaken up?’ Then, as she cast around for something – anything – that would reassure her this was all a fucking dream, she spotted her audience. There were islanders everywhere: beside, or in between, or emerging from, the towers. Some were on horseback, some on foot. A small army of men and women, all of them in soft grey shirts, grey leggings and calf-length boots. As Alex watched, they began to cluster into pairs and groups, whispering. And not once did a single one of them take his or her eyes off her.
One of the heavies muttered something.
‘Miss Moore,’ Iain said, cupping his hands beside the stirrup of one of the monsters. ‘Get on the horse.’
Alex got on the horse.
As their group cantered around tower after tower, forging deeper into the maze, Alex had to use all her concentration to stay in the saddle. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but glimpse white faces turning to watch her pass, or flashing up at her as they emerged from the chutes.
‘What are you people?’ she asked Iain, when they finally came to a halt beside a tower. Two guards were stationed outside. Iain lifted her out of her saddle as if she weighed nothing at all. Her feet hit the ground, her knees buckled and, to her shame, she found herself having to grab onto his meaty arms to stop herself from falling.
‘What are we?’ he said quietly. ‘What are you—?’
‘We’re not anything,’ Taran interrupted, shambling up beside her, having evidently overheard. Iain led their horses over to the guards without looking back. ‘People from the Library islands can Read. People from anywhere else on earth cannot. That’s the only difference.’
‘So what did Iain mean, just now? When he asked me what I am? Not John . . . I mean, Finn MacEgan said something similar when he came to my office.’ Whatever you are.
/> ‘Ah, well,’ Taran said. ‘You’re special.’
‘But I’m not,’ Alex pleaded, searching his grey eyes. ‘Honestly. I’m simply a thirty-one-year-old nobody who came up with the idea for a website. We haven’t even monetized yet. Please, you have to understand, you’ve got the wrong . . . whatever you’re looking for.’
‘On no.’ Taran smiled. ‘You’re her, alright. You’re extraordinary, Alex. More extraordinary than you know.’
There was a crunch and a squelch. Alex turned to see the soles of Curstag MacRob’s boots disappearing into the chute at the bottom of the tower.
‘In you go,’ MacBrian said, marching up beside them. She looked round, frowning, at the towers nearby.
‘But I’m—’
‘Quickly, if you please, Miss Moore. We’re causing enough disturbance as it is.’
Alex looked at Taran, who smiled. She looked at Iain and the guards, who didn’t. And there was no choice but to keep moving, to keep playing, to get on her hands and feet in the dirt and plunge into the dark.
The moment she entered the chute, Alex knew something was wrong – a wrong that was way beyond all the other incalculable wrongness that had suddenly wrapped itself around the world. Unlike the other towers, this one was sending no welcoming pull to encourage her in. On the contrary, as she slid along the stone she felt an instinctive pang of dread, an immediate urge to turn back. When MacRob yanked her over the lip, the only thing she could see was the greasy yellow halo of a lamp, placed on the ground a few feet away beside the wall. But that, she suddenly realized, was exactly the problem. In Stack I-537 there were no glowing spheres docked in the wall, no distant others roiling behind them. There was no velvety calm to soothe her hammering heart. The air was dark and dry and cold, and the only smell was that of her own fear.
