She was twenty and Singapore was drowning. Most of the people had left—garbage ran in the tide race between buildings, and Malay looters plied the waters downtown—and the government did little more than post edicts online demanding Confucian fortitude and virtue. Young people from all over had converged there to roost among the sinking towers, that last summer of the city’s viability, and, having no need to work, and no ties to bind her, she’d joined them.
Construction drones were just getting cheap and spavined older models were all over the rooftops. She built herself a room on top of an old glass-and-steel skyscraper, its base flooded, her room and the other itinerants’ clustered like swallows’ nests. The trip was nominally educational—she was enrolled at the national university—but she rarely went to class and someone told her that most of the teachers had left the city.
Such stores as weren’t sunk were empty, but a boy on her rooftop had a boat and would take her to the market ships down from Malaysia; the ships’ holds, creaking, rusty and as long as a landing strip, were full of multicolored piles of gemlike fruit, crates of tinned beef, oranges, milk, the dizzying stench of durian. She and her new friends often made grand plans—snorkeling expeditions, trips to the wreck of the Raffles Hotel—but these ambitions rarely materialized; most days they woke in the afternoon and spent the nights at parties on the lowest unflooded levels—dance music and strobe lights, the sweat of strangers, long-haired boys burning marijuana by the bale, the music’s pauses filled with the reverberation of the waves.
It was a beautifully disposable youth. When it was time to go, people would just leave, rarely saying goodbye, their rooms left to the next squatter. One girl sealed over the door to her room, forever preserving the wilted Kerouac paperbacks and empty vodka bottles. Irina left the day she noticed that her tower was listing. A few of the kids spoke of staying forever, of founding families among the waves, of building mansions out of concrete and raising them ever higher as the seas rose—a mistake, she thought, as their interlude, like the city, had a term.
She wonders whether her room is above water, still, or has sunk, become the abode of rays and fishes, and lets the tremendous mass of old data sink once again into the dark.
She’s kept equally detailed recollections of old lovers. Someday, if she has children, she will edit these, and leave her descendants this eidetic record of her life, and will they be abashed to know her so completely?
Her afternoon with Water and Power is in the periphery of her awareness, there toward the surface of her memory, and she’s about to let it dissolve—she’ll retain her memories of their AIs, which is technically a breach of contract, but one she commits all the time, and no one has ever been the wiser—but she finds herself disliking Cromwell and Magda more than seems reasonable, given how often she’s worked for worse.
She calls up her ten minutes in Cromwell’s office, holding all of it in her mind, sees how when she’d walked into his office, he’d looked up from his laptop and for a tenth of a second he had a strange expression comprised of wonder and fear and superiority, like a man who knew a secret.
It could be anything, is probably nothing, but now she is intent, and sees how quickly he’d closed his laptop, the Cycladic figures on his desk, the grey at the great man’s temples, the almost tangible light, and there it is: his laptop had faced away from her but there in the antique affectation of his eyeglasses there’s a reflection of its screen, and zooming in she sees a browser window, and though most of the text is too small to read there are many sequences of legible numbers, probably GPS coordinates, and above them all is a single word, MNEMOSYNE.
16
Circumference
In the town car on the way back to the hotel Thales feels a lucidity bordering on euphoria and his mind is like a searchlight moving over the surface of the city. A gap between buildings frames a rectangle of the dull lunar gold of the dry mountains and the wildfires’ swathes of black ash and he remembers their flight into Los Angeles, how the plane had banked over the golden mountains and then the shock of his first sight of the city, the dull glare of the vast plain of concrete and glass, which seemed to have no limit, its far boundary lost in the enveloping smog, and he’d remembered that someone had said God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference doesn’t exist.
The car shudders over concentric rings of fissured concrete characteristic of an exploded IED—placed by whom, he wonders, and what, here, had they expected political violence to accomplish?—and now there’s a row of dying, dessicated palms that must once have been meant to evoke a Polynesian tropicality, though Los Angeles has always been a desert, and never more than now.
It’s not at all like Rio, he thinks, because Rio is like … what? He tries to remember but can only come up with a handful of images—his school, their home, a beach—though he’s lived most of his life there.
Another car follows his on the turn off from the freeway onto the surface streets of Venice Beach, and he realizes that it’s been behind him for miles, and in fact is the same model as his own, though filthy, like it hasn’t been washed in weeks.
The other car pulls alongside. Seconds pass and nothing happens. Heart racing, he’s ready to give the command that would put the car on full alert and elicit its focused aggression, but if this other party were really determined to hurt him they could already have started shooting, and he wants to know if they’re really following him, and if so why, so even though it’s almost certainly a mistake he lowers his window.
His reflection in the black glass of the other car’s window and the hot sunlight on his face but as the road turns the light’s angle changes and the other car’s window becomes translucent enough for him to see that it’s probably a woman, on the other side, and then his car makes the sharp turn onto the shielded ramp leading down into the St. Mark’s garage which makes the other car vanish.
17
Tunnel
Rain washes in sheets over the cab’s windshield as Irina opens a map in her other memory. The map shows the whole world but the Mnemosyne coordinates are all in San Francisco, so apparently it’s a local thing. Each coordinate has an extra number, which at first leaves her nonplussed, but then she realizes it’s probably altitude, which means that these locations are mostly underground.