I still dream, p.12
I Still Dream, page 12
The bathroom had proper cisterns. The sort of place with a proper cistern, you know what gets snorted off them. We did it in sync. I got chatting to him in the bar after that, and then one of the girls he was with. She worked for this start-up that was trying to build a recipe app. Everybody worked for a start-up, and everybody was building their own recipe app. Everybody.
‘Do you want to come back to my place?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. I bought more of the sunglasses/scarf guy’s coke, and got the doorman at the hotel to hail us a cab.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked her, in the cab. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think I—’
‘Laura,’ she said.
Which, of course it was.
My Laura called me when I was sleeping. It was nearly light. Birds singing. The other Laura was in my bed, in the space where Laura should have been. I wondered, for a second, if the mattress didn’t fit her properly. The indents, if they were wrong.
‘What?’ I asked. Tried to play it cool. Just the right amount of not needing her, or thinking about her.
‘I need your help.’
‘Where are you?’ I sat up. She sounded panicked. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I need your help, Charlie. I’m at Bow.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I hung up, shook the other Laura. I could see her for the usurper she was. A Laura, not the Laura. ‘You have to go,’ I said to her. ‘I have to get to work, and you have to leave with me.’
‘It’s—’ She looked at her own phone, left on the bedside table like she’d moved in, like she had some reason to leave it there. ‘Jesus, it’s not even five—’
‘I have to go. There’s an emergency.’
‘What sort of emergency does a tech company have at this time in the morning?’ I got dressed. I stood there in front of her, pulling on clothes, and I watched her until she sighed and stood up, and yanked her jeans on. ‘You could at least get me a glass of water,’ she said.
We stood next to each other at the sink and drank water from the pint glasses I stole when I was a student from this Irish bar on St Patrick’s day. I threw up right after: after both the stealing, and the drinking water.
‘I’ll call you a cab,’ I said, from the bathroom, while she finished dressing. Wiping my face, cleaning my teeth, telling myself that I was sober, that I wasn’t still reeling from a night that I wasn’t really used to. But I didn’t need to bother. She was already gone.
Laura Bow was standing outside the door to the office, under the weird galleon. Body folded around itself, because the wind was harsh, colder than it had any right to be that time of year. She wasn’t dressed for it.
She looked up at the headlights, and I thought, fuck it, we can do this. I can say that I’m sorry, that I should have trusted her, and she should have been able to trust me. We should give this another go. Never mind the smell of the other Laura still on me. Put those thoughts out of your mind, and we’ll try again.
‘It’s early,’ I said to her. ‘Are you okay?’ I focused everything on the words as they left my mouth. I wanted her to see that I was sober enough to do this. I couldn’t fool her entirely, but maybe just enough.
‘I can’t get in. Ocean’s revoked my access.’
‘What?’
‘I quit, Charlie. I told him earlier today. No, yesterday, now, I suppose. Whatever. And now he’s gone and changed the locks.’ She quit. Or, she jumped, before she was pushed. She must have known it was coming, even without me having the chance to warn her.
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I came for Organon.’ She held my wrist. Not my hand. I was wobbling, unsteady, and she held my wrist. I wondered if she could feel my heart beating, underneath her thumb. That thin bit of skin between me – the real me – and her. ‘I can’t leave it, Charlie. I didn’t think he’d stop me getting in to get my stuff.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I lifted my card to the scanner.
Red. Buzz. Denied.
‘What the fuck?’ I snapped her hand away from my wrist, up to the scanner again. Red, buzz, denied. ‘Motherfucker!’
‘He must have thought—’
‘Fuck him,’ I said. ‘Fuck. Him.’ I started to walk. Changed my focus from concentrating on my speech to my feet. I didn’t want to screw that part up, one foot in front of the other. That should have come naturally. And it was easy: as soon as that adrenalin kicked in, everything started to make a little bit more sense to me.
‘Where are you going?’ She chased behind me, and we walked around the building to where the windows for our lab were. First floor, and all the lights were on. Somebody was in there. ‘What—’
‘Hang on,’ I said. I stepped backwards, to get as much of a view in as I could. And there was Park, at one of the terminals. I could see the tip of his hair. As good a beacon as I’ve ever seen. Then we ran to the main building, across the grass, the thing we called a quad. Nobody playing with a Frisbee, nobody trying to fly a kite. Nobody eating quinoa salads out on picnic blankets. The birds in the trees chirping, and I looked up at them, and I saw that they were bright green. Like parakeets or something, something exotic. This chirrup from their mouths as the sun broke the horizon.
The main building was only a few offices. Mark Ocean’s, the heads of marketing, of sales, of publicity, the CTO. Actual security guards posted here, behind a desk in the reception. But also: this is where the kitchens were. This is where they made the food: three meals a day, and as many snacks as you wanted. Even if the quality of the produce dropped as Bow tried to save money, the schedule didn’t.
We went to the delivery area. Every morning bread came, meat, and fruit. Every morning. Used to be that, on all-nighters, I would sit and watch the vans pulling up; and sometimes – particularly when I smoked – I would walk around to the loading bay and I’d smell the bread as it came out of the vehicles, that fresh smell, like a bakery. Say hi to the guys. Get just high enough with them before I went back to my keyboard.
The van was still there. The access doors were still open, rolled back wide.
‘In here,’ I said, and then we followed the orange lines – painted onto the walls as if the building was a hospital – around to the server-room door. Behind it: steps went down into the cool of a basement area that ran under a huge part of the whole campus.
The door had another swipe slot. I was praying that my access hadn’t been entirely revoked. Just temporarily, just to stop me getting into the R & D building.
Praying. Cross fingers, if you don’t believe in a god.
Swipe, and green, and beep, and the click of the lock.
We ran down the stairs. ‘Find the server for the auditorium. It’ll be labelled something logical? Aud-something, I reckon.’ There were rows and rows of the boxes, whirring and clicking. It was like a wine cellar full of technology. So we split up, taking a row each, checking every single box. I had to keep reminding myself to focus: eyes on the letters printed onto the tape stuck to the front of them. I was in that hazy part of drunk where letters, individual letters, start to lose their form, start to jumble themselves.
I’ve got a kid, now – I say that he’s a kid, he’s all grown up – who’s dyslexic. When he talks about the dyslexia, something he was told to do in school, something he still explains when he’s stumbling with words, when he tells me what it’s like for him, that’s what it reminds me of. Searching through those letters, looking for some mystical code. Trying to understand something that’s just out of reach.
I don’t know how much time passed before Laura found it. She shouted, like this Eureka! moment, and I ran to her. ‘Plug your laptop in,’ I said, and she did. ‘Find the drive, change the permissions—’
‘I’ve got it,’ she said. I watched as she found the files on the shared drive, the one from the performance earlier that day. ‘It’s not the most up-to-date,’ she said.
‘But the code’s the same, right?’
‘The code is the same. It’ll have just lost a day or two.’
Okay, I thought. A day or two. Nothing, in the scale of things.
One of my biggest worries, when I make a decision, is the repercussions. Not whether I’ll be able to fix it or not, because generally, if you want something you’ve done undone, it’s not that hard. But the memory of what you did? That’s for ever. That can have impacts beyond anything you’ve even considered.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘What?’ The little bar on her screen, copying the information over. We watched that bar, and didn’t look at each other.
‘I shouldn’t have said—’
‘Charlie.’ That utterance of my name was so loaded. So much in it. In one word, two syllables. Charlie. Like I’d never heard anybody say my name before that moment; telling me to stop talking.
I didn’t listen. I said it anyway. ‘I miss you, and I want—’
‘Charlie, we would have broken up. Whatever happened between us, we would have broken up in the end. It wasn’t meant to be for ever, was it? You know that just as well as I do.’ The bar filled. ‘I should delete this from this server.’
‘They’ve got it, already. Park will have gotten it from your desktop.’
‘Not the whole thing. You need the whole database for it to work. Otherwise it’s just text-to-speech, really. It exists in the present, when it doesn’t have anything to draw back on, and those files – the ones on my desktop – they’re all password locked. They’ll rot if somebody tries to hack in. Without my past, Organon’s nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a learning engine.’ When the words come out, and they’re all you can do to stop from focusing on the now, on the moment; so you keep talking, hoping that everything can move forward.
‘Thank you for helping me. You didn’t need to.’
‘Let me do it for you. You get out of here, and I’ll do it; make sure the servers are scrubbed.’ I don’t know if, when I told her that, I intended to do that. Mark Ocean’s offer was ringing in my ears. ‘I’ll stay behind and do it. Pretty sure I’m just locked out, not actually fired. But if they catch you here?’
I hadn’t made up my mind. I like to tell myself that, at least.
‘You’re going to be in so much shit,’ she said. I knew that they would fire me. Maybe file criminal charges, if they could be bothered. If they wanted to. And I wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. That was me fucked: a whole career, up in glorious smoke, with nothing to show for it.
‘I was serious,’ I said, because I was focused on that, on Laura. On everything we’d done together; the good times we’d shared. There had been so many, and I had fucked it up.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘So was I. This would have ended eventually. You’re – we’re – in different places. It’s a cliché, but. You know.’
‘You should go,’ I said. I turned away from her, went up the stairs. Held the door as she packed away her laptop. We went out of the building the way that we came in, through the kitchens. She grabbed a cinnamon bun on the way out, freshly laid out in trays. It was light outside, then, like we’d been in that dark basement for hours.
‘I figure I deserve this,’ she said, ‘one last breakfast on Bow.’ Her father’s company. The one that he started. She was going to say goodbye to it without any hesitation. No fighting. She’d gotten what she wanted.
I told myself that I still hadn’t made up my mind. And, what, I wanted to give her one last chance?
I was a fucking idiot.
‘I still love you,’ I said. On the quad. Bicycles parked up. The first signs of life, and the birds – those chirping, yellow-green birds – were all gone.
‘Okay,’ she said.
She kissed me on the cheek, and she thanked me. Said she’d never forget what I’d done for her. Never ever. She said that she hoped that SCION was everything I wanted it to be, and that was vague and guarded, unjudged, but absolutely full of judgement. Reeked of it.
I watched her leave. Walking, which was insane. You couldn’t walk from Cupertino back to San Francisco. You couldn’t. I don’t even know if it was physically possible.
* * *
‘You’re early,’ Park said to me. I was sitting outside the doors to R & D, waiting for somebody to turn up and let me in, when he came downstairs to the bathrooms, saw me on his way back up.
‘Not as early as you.’ Since Laura had gone, I’d stopped having to think about my speech, about holding my focus. It didn’t even feel like I’d been drinking at all. ‘You’ve been here all night?’
‘Midnight oil needed burning,’ he said. ‘You not coming in?’
‘My card wasn’t working,’ I replied. I waited. I wanted to know if he knew that I was there, that my access had been revoked.
He nodded. ‘Happens sometimes,’ he said.
‘What have you been doing?’ I followed him up the stairs. There was the distinctive smell of sweat and coffee that you only really notice when you’ve been outside for a while. Then it takes your brain a couple of minutes to adjust, and you block it right out again. But while it’s fresh, in that moment, it’s disorientating. I felt the remnants of the alcohol come back, somewhere between a hangover and still drunk, and all the adrenaline-charged parts in between. ‘You’ve been in all night?’
‘Mark wanted some things done to SCION,’ he said. ‘We’ve been given permission to go online.’
‘For real?’
‘He said – direct quote – that it’s the only way to move us forward as fast as we need to move.’ Park shrugged. ‘I just put it out there, and he agreed.’
‘Did you tell him that Organon had already been online?’
‘Dude,’ he said, which meant that he had. I knew, before he stopped walking, before he turned and looked at me with this sheepish look on his face, tilted his head, closed his eyes for altogether too long as he worked out whether it was better to tell me outright, or to lie. ‘I know you guys are in this thing—’
‘There’s no thing,’ I said. ‘We were in a thing, and now it’s done.’
‘I thought you would—’
‘It’s done.’ And, ‘She’s been fired. Or she quit. She’s gone, anyway.’
‘I heard something about that. Harsh. So, that’s the other thing. Mark told me you’re going to be running a splinter team, to integrate Organon into SCION? Mark says there’s some great tech in there. Some stuff we can learn from. He wants to bring on some freelancers, from Memorain, Locutus, ClearVista. People who we can learn from about what to do with some of the tech, maybe.’ He dropped his voice to a whisper. Like anybody else in the building gave half a shit about this stuff, or wasn’t going to know it all in the end anyway. ‘That’s going to be such a cool project, bud. Apparently, there might even be code in there from back in Daniel Bow’s day. Not easy work, you know?’
At my desk, I looked at the files I had told Laura I would delete; and I looked over at Laura’s desk, cleared of personal effects. She didn’t get a chance to do the movie thing: to get a cardboard box, to stand there and fill it with her photographs and MP3 player and little Totoro figurine and her expensive pencils that she insisted upon buying. It was a blank desk, a screen on top of it. A mouse and a keyboard, but not her mouse and keyboard. They’d been swapped out in favor of bland, box-fresh new devices. The kind that come with a system that nobody likes to use.
Nobody sat at it. The whole day, while I sat at my computer, while I stared at this code for SCION that was already outdated compared with what I believed Organon might be capable of, not a single person sat at Laura’s desk.
Nobody had touched Laura’s computer. IT wouldn’t wipe it until they’d gotten everything they needed from it, so for now, it was exactly as it was before she left. All they’d done was give me her password, tell me to get started.
Her desktop was a photograph she’d taken when we drove through Death Valley a year previous. Her folders were named for stuff she liked. A shitload of music on there, and some videos. Her bookmarks when I opened up the browser, telling me what she visited most. Information that felt as though you could compile it, make a version of her from these tangible memories of what she liked.
I didn’t know where she kept her database, but I needed to find it. The IT department would come looking, or Park would look, and it would only be a matter of time before they found it. Nothing’s hidden for ever.
If I found it, I could take the file to Ocean, and I could tell him how it worked. I could sync it all up, embed it into SCION. Make our project conjoined, and better. Learn from it. Promotion, career, money, all those things.
Or I could find her database, delete it. I knew how it worked, in theory; but I could remove her memories from this thing.
One of those twelve tips, for getting over the grief of a break-up: you remove the memory of the person from in front of you.
