One of Us (5 page)

"How's that?" I knew this was most likely a stroke, but didn't care. They didn't come along that often.

"You took four dreams last night without breaking sweat. The two you've just seen, and another two—one of which was so boring I can't bear to even watch just the visuals. You could probably have taken a couple more. You could make a lot of money, Mr. Thompson."

"How much is a lot?"

"We pay according to dream duration, with additional payments if the dreams are especially complex or tedious. Last night you erased over three hundred dollars' worth—and that doesn't factor in a bonus for the dullest one. Depending how often you worked, you could be earning between two and three thousand dollars. A week." He closed the pitch. "And we pay cash. Dream disposal is still in an unstable state with regard to legality. We find it more convenient to obfuscate the nature of our business to some of the authorities."

He smiled. I smiled back.

Three thousand dollars is an awful lot of bartending.

It wasn't a difficult decision.

I SIGNED a nondisclosure contract. I was leased a receiver, and had it explained to me. Basically I could go anywhere in the continental United States as long as I kept the machine within six feet of my head while I was asleep. I didn't have to go to bed at any particular time, because the dreams booked to me were just spooled into memory. As soon as the device sensed I was in REM sleep, it fed the backlog into my head. When I got up in the morning, my nightwork would be there on the screen like a list of email messages: how long each of the dreams had been, when it started and finished, and whether it qualified for bonus payment or was just hack work.

And at the bottom of the list, the good news. A figure in dollars. I found I could take six or seven dreams a night without too much difficulty. Some days I'd be groggy and find it difficult to concentrate on anything more complex than smoking, but when that happened I'd just take the following night off.

After six months I was recalled to REMtemps's offices and Stratten asked if I'd like to volunteer for a higher proportion of bonus dreams. I said "Hell, yes," and my earnings took another leap upward. I met a hacker called Quat on the Net, and hired him to write me a demon that would circulate my earnings around a variety of virtual accounts: Every now and then the IRS or some other ratfink would close in on one of them, but when that happened I'd just swallow the loss and keep the rest of it on the move. I also paid Quat a lot of money to erase a particular incident from the LAPD's crimebank, which meant I could go back to California.

It was a good life. I traveled from place to place, this time as a person with money instead of someone looking for a score. After a while it seemed natural to wear better clothes, to head for the upscale hotels. I got used to the other things that money gets you, like a modicum of respect, and bed companions who don't issue you with an invoice in the morning. I kept in touch with the few people I cared about through the phone, the Net, and occasional flying visits. I dropped in on Deck in LA a couple of times, and the city began to lose its darkness for me. I began to think of moving back there, of letting it be my place once again.

There were occasional downsides. Boredom. The exhaustion that came after a night full of bonuses, and the emotional flatness from being forever on the move and never having a relationship that lasted longer than a few days. There were periods when I'd go a little weird, and I came to realize that was because I'd spent so many nights having other people's dreams, I hadn't had time for any of my own. When that happened, I'd clock off, let my mind catch up, and do the subconscious boogie. After a few days I'd be fine again.

I'd found some action that was safe, I was good at, and paid big-time money.

That should have been enough.

THEN FIVE MONTHS AGO I got a call from Stratten. It came very early in the morning, and I was crashed out in a king-sized bed on the top floor of a hotel in New Orleans, the debris of a hard evening's pleasure spread all around me. By then I was back more or less full-time in LA, and had an apartment in Griffith which I called home. I wasn't supposed to hang in one place, however, so I took enough trips out of town to convince REMtemps I was still itinerant.

I couldn't remember the name of the woman beside me, but she was a whiz at answering the phone. By the time I'd realized it was ringing, she already had it up out of its cradle and at her ear. When she passed it over to me I sat up, head foggy and full of half-remembered tasks and confusions. I suppressed the urge to look at the receiver to see how much I'd earned. From the way I felt, I knew it was going to be considerable.

"Mr. Thompson," said that voice, and I instantly became more awake. "Who answered the phone?"

"I don't know," I said stupidly. "I mean, why? What difference does it make?"

"I assume she's someone you've met quite recently?"

"Yes." I glanced across the room to where the woman was standing. Candy, I think her name may have been, though she may well have spelled it with an I. At the end, I mean. She seemed nice, and I got the feeling she actually liked me. I was wondering whether she might be interested in hooking up with me for a while. A whole week, maybe, until I went back to LA. At that moment she was making coffee with no clothes on, and I was hoping Stratten would stop talking soon.

"You met her last night, correct?" he asked. I admitted that was the case. "And she's in your hotel room. But she answered the phone after a single ring."

I took a sip from the beer bottle by the bed. "So?"

"Think about it."

I watched as Candy stirred just the right amount of sugar into my coffee. I got what he was driving at. "Don't talk shit," I said. Candy winked at me and slipped into the John.

"Get rid of her and come to the office," Stratten told me. "I have a proposal for you." The line went dead.

I got out of bed and put the dream receiver in my bag. The readout said I'd earned over a thousand dollars. I got dressed, and when Candy came back out, spruced up and fresh and ready to play, I said I had to go out for a while. She took it badly, and then well, and then badly again. She tried a lot of things to get me to stay. When it was clear that wasn't working, she said she'd hang in the room and wait for me. For however long it took.

Call me someone with low self-esteem, but women don't usually react that way after a single night in my company. I'm kind of an acquired taste. It wasn't proof, but it was enough to make me gather my things and walk out the door, leaving her standing shouting after me. In the elevator I did what I'd been told to do in such circumstances, and pressed a recessed button on the side of the dream receiver. There was a soft "crump" sound from within, and the readout panel went black. The unit was now dead, logic board fused into inexplicability.

On the plane to Jacksonville it occurred to me to wonder why—if Candy had been some kind of federal agent—she hadn't just done whatever she needed to do while I was sleeping. If there was one thing a REMtemp was guaranteed to do most nights, it was catch some zees. Maybe she'd needed to talk to me, get names or something. I'd only ever worked on the wrong side of the law, so I didn't know how the good guys did things. Perhaps they'd had me pegged as a potential witness against Stratten, in which case they obviously hadn't met the guy. It didn't make much difference. I had to go back to the office anyway now, to pick up a replacement receiver.

Slumped over a table in an upmarket cafe around the corner, I mainlined a gallon of coffee and a half pack of cigarettes before reporting to REMtemps. Usually the fog faded to a soft confusion after a couple of hours, but this morning it felt like I'd never slept in my whole life. I wanted to be sharp to respond to whatever proposal Stratten had in mind, but in the end I settled for being not actually asleep and just lurched over there.

This time we didn't meet in a side office, but in Stratten's own den. The office was no bigger than your average football field, but luckily we sat at the same end, so we didn't have to shout. I told him I'd done what he told me, and he smiled. I added that I'd fried the machine, also as per instructions, and that I'd need another one. He smiled again. Then he started talking.

Though I didn't know it, a number of the company's most important clients now asked for me specifically. Most REMtemps left vestiges behind, elements personal to the dreamer that the temps couldn't assimilate. I erased the whole lot, every little shadow and whisper. Hence the bonuses. Hence also the fact that Stratten wanted to offer me a more lucrative line of work.

Memories.

As soon as he said the word, I started shaking my head vigorously and at high speed. Memories can be externalized, but it doesn't work in the same way as dreams. They can't be erased because they are a function of something that has happened in the real world. They can merely be blanked or stored somewhere else, on a temporary or permanent basis, and doing so is absolutely and completely illegal.

For a start, it means that polygraphs don't work. If a suspect genuinely has no memory of committing a crime, fooling the lie detector is a breeze. In a way, it isn't even deception. As far as the guy is concerned, the incident never happened.

Plus this: People are their memories. What has happened is what you are. If you remove the childhood incidents where someone learned right from wrong, you end up with a guy who's kind of difficult to deal with. He just doesn't care. Such people don't understand why they shouldn't steal, or rape, or murder - and that makes them better at stealing, raping, and murdering. In the unlikely event they do get caught, another memory dump just before the polygraph will completely blank that line of evidence right away.

A test case eighteen months before had settled the issue. A freelance proxy dreamer who'd agreed to carry a criminal's memory of a certain event during the trial was sentenced to two life terms—exactly half what the real culprit would have received had he been convicted.

In other words, memories weren't a trade with long-term prospects, and I said as much to Stratten. He heard me out, and when I'd ground to a halt, he let a silence settle. After it had gone on so long that it seemed like what I'd said had been to another person on some other day, he began.

"Yes," he said. "The caretaking of criminal recall is illegal."

"Good," I said affably. "That's settled, then. Where do I pick up my new receiver?"

"However," Stratten continued as if I'd said nothing at all, "the memories I'm referring to do not relate to illegal activities. I'm talking about trivial things, and only temporary transferrals."

"If they're that trivial, let the clients deal with them," I suggested. "And if it's only temporary, tell them to try a few beers instead. Nope, and no thank you. Also, no."

"Five thousand dollars a memory," he said. I stopped speaking before my mouth had even framed the next word. "The memory could be a single instant, an individual fact, and you'd never hold one for more than a week. Usually only a few hours. You could score a quarter million dollars over twelve months without breaking sweat. Plus you can still do the dreamwork."

He let that sink in for a while, and I thought about it. About pulling in seven figures a year. The last couple of years had been good, but wealth has a way of operating on a sliding scale. When you've bought all the stuff you can at your current level, you start noticing the things you still can't have. And start wanting that stuff instead.

Looked at another way: a couple years' work, some sensible investments, and I'd never have to lift a synapse again.

"No," I said. I knew where I was, and I was doing okay.

"You'll find the answer's yes," Stratten said, "when you ask me where you pick up your new receiver."

My mind was still dulled from the night's work: I didn't get what he was driving at. I just fed him his line. "Where?"

"Unless you accept my offer, you don't," he said. "You take memory work. Or you're fired."

I stared at him. "You're a fucker, aren't you," I said.

"I have heard that opinion expressed." His smile didn't waver, and I realized it wasn't a smile and probably never had been.

I looked out the window for a while, more to keep him waiting than for any other reason. I understood now that Candy hadn't really liked me, and that she hadn't even been a fed. She'd been nothing more than a manipulation tool hired by Stratten. He would have known that I'd just woken up when he called, and that I'd be unable to judge the situation properly after a night full of heavy bonuses and bed-oriented frolicking. He was right. Candy had done her job well.

At that moment I understood both that I didn't really have any idea what Stratten was capable of, and that I just couldn't tell with women anymore. I'm not sure which was worse.

Stratten had me, and he knew it. Without dreamwork I was back on the streets. I had money squirreled away, spinning around the tracks Quat had laid for it in the ether, but not enough. Too much of it had been pissed away.

With memory work I could buy my own bar if it came to it.

"Okay," I told Stratten.

CHAPTER THREE

At two-thirty in the morning I saw her, walking up the street toward a small hotel a couple of blocks off the boulevard. It was called the Nirvana Inn, but unless that ineffable plane has peeling paint on the outside and no room service after ten, I suspect the name was a bit of a misnomer. I was sitting in a diner opposite, drinking bad coffee and biding my time, and I recognized her immediately. It was Laura Reynolds. No question.

This was the first time I'd seen someone I was caretaking for, and it felt disturbing, wrong. Like remembering you're dead, or seeing a doppelganger who looks nothing like you. Laura Reynolds was in her late twenties, thin and wired—trying to remember how to look like drift life after years of learning to forget. Her face was bony, pretty, intense. She walked like someone who'd spent most of the evening in a bar and flash-lit by neon in the slanting rain, and she looked like a computer sprite who had suddenly found itself in the wrong video game, with no instructions.