by Thorsten Küper
Translated by Michael K. Iwoleit
It may well be that I’m already on your tail. Right now. Of course you wouldn’t notice, although I’ve already been following you for some days. Although I’ve studied your lifestyle habits and thoroughly searched your apartment. I already know all there is to know about your life. I know your habits, your strange needs, all the dirty little secrets, your neuroses, your phobias, your compulsions. I know you better than I know myself – but that’s actually not so remarkable.
You may even see me one or two times, but your eyes would just pass over me. You would not consciously notice my presence. Mine is just one of millions of faces, one of these grimaces lacking any personality that you look straight through. Too pale, too nondescript, my facial features far too average, lacking something distinctive. I’m just like anybody. You wouldn’t even perceive my eyes behind the mirrorshades.
So I would follow you for a couple of days while approaching you only two times.
The first time to take a sample. A used soft tissue, a Q-tip, a spat-out chewing gum or cigarette filter, cutlery that you have used. The second time I will be carrying a case.
It will definitely be too late for you then. An escape, however, would have been pointless from the outset.
You can’t escape me, just as you can’t run away from yourself. You never had the slightest chance. I’ve been doing this for much too long.
Justine descends into an underpass. I’m following her while projectors paint a blue sky with softly drifting clouds onto the semi-cylindrical tunnel walls. The clouds assemble into a cotton wool-like string of characters, praising a psychiatric drug. It’s one of the drugs that Justine consumes herself. One of the 14 compounds that she swallows each day. She flushes down most of them with strong red wine.
Today is the day when I carry the case. Only for her.
Justine won’t escape me either.
You can she that she’s in the advertising business. Expensive makeup, dark brown shoulder-length hair that she usually wears in a braid, but loose today. Shoes with high, I mean really high, heels pointed like needles. They make a noise like splinters of glass hitting the pavement.
I’ve been watching her for a few days straying through her ready-made, plastic life. Yes, there’s a certain kind of structure, a fixed daily routine. She does her job in a responsible manner, performs her tasks like an automat. She seems calm, even at ease while developing meaningless marketing concepts.
But there’s always a certain unrest as soon as she leaves her office. Sometimes she looks up and turns around as if she has heard someone calling her name. Sometimes she freezes and looks down as if she expects to find something revealing at her feet. And sometimes when she’s facing her own reflection in a mirror she hesitates and stares as if she’s recognizing this face as her own for the first time. As if she’s having her first encounter with herself.
An unconscious reflex, some corner of her mind instinctively searching for itself, reaching for an insight, trying to fill gaps. In vain.
Most of them do it. It’s a pattern of behavior that I’ve observed again and again. Including the obsession with appearances. Perfect styling, perfect makeup, expensive outfit, surgical adjustments, sometimes half a dozen within a few months. An almost pathological attempt to define one’s self through outer appearance. The high price they pay for becoming an empty shell – since there’s nothing left on the inside.
I’ve taken Justine’s sample from the little tube that she puts into her nose to dust her mucosae with a white powder. Just a few epithelia have been sufficient. I’ve conducted the test with a portable scanner in my hotel room. It has identified her conclusively.
She’s the right one.
Pity? Do I feel pity for her? No, I don’t think that I ever feel pity for them.
I just do what has to be done.
*
The guests are sent upwards in groups of about 40 people with a freight elevator that obviously has been installed afterwards. I’ve been waiting in line in front of the building for almost two hours. Less than 15 feet behind Justine, who has not looked a single time in my direction. Her flirt with an Arabic-looking man has lasted only a few minutes and ended when two other women showed up, who revealed themselves as his partners by exchanging intense tongue kisses with him. Justine ended the talk visibly annoyed and preferred to wait for the next elevator. It carries us up to the top floor of the old hospital. The case in my hand becomes heavier for a few seconds. My fellow passengers would be surprised by its contents.
The elevator car is made of shining metal and glass and seems to be brand-new. It’s flooded with unobtrusive club sounds from hidden speakers, just loud enough to drown out the faint conversation of the guests. You can look into and out of the building through transparent walls. All floors of the building are in an unfinished state, without exception. Glassless windows gape like empty eyesockets. Pools of black rainwater have collected on the floor, reflecting the elevator car. There are not even stairs between the levels. A building project that has run out of money halfway. One of many.
This is not a permanent club. It will probably move to the next building tomorrow because this is not an official party. Meaning: no cameras.
Justine leans directly against the outward wall of the elevator, her palms on the pane. Her inert eyes contemplate the city – or her own mirror image. I see myself lean behind her and take care not to look at her reflection in the glass for too long. An unusually tall woman to the left of me with the wide, high cheekbones of an Asian is scrutinizing me. As I look at her directly, she turns away embarrassed. I have to correct my first impression. Her face … something is wrong about it. The nose is too wide, the chin too vigorous. A ladyboy, almost seven feet tall. He tries again a few seconds later. His far too flamboyantly made-up features are distorted into the imitation of an uneasy smile. If he’s waiting for a response, I have to disappoint him. Instead I turn around as the elevator stops and the pane behind me slides aside.
A surge of drum and bass sounds sweeps across us. I don’t hear any voices. I only see moving mouths that emit no sound. My eyes take some time to adapt to the semidarkness that is cut by blue and green blades of light. Over the heads of the guests, giant tongues moisten rubbery lips.
Devices project a kaleidoscope of female mouths onto the dome above. On heavy operating tables that are suspended by steel ropes from the ceiling, female dancers twist about with bound hands. Someone has spent a lot of money and hasn’t got much more than cheap whorehouse aesthetics in return.
I begin to move, just slow enough for Justine to outpace me. She’s actually squeezing past me in the flow of the new arrivals and thus makes it easy for me to keep on her tail. She’s pushing swiftly and purposefully through the crowd. While heading for a particular spot, she pulls a mask out of her bag that hides her eyes, brow, and nose. Many hide their faces here. Especially the consumers of illegal substances.
Two minutes later Justine bargains with a huddled figure behind a workbench of sorts. The man’s face is also covered by a mask. Unlike the masks of the other visitors, his is connected to an oxygen tank. A brawny, angular woman sits in front of a holographic display with her back towards him and Justine. The online version of the Financial Times hangs in front of her face. She looks over her shoulder now and then and at one point touches the shoulder of the man with the oxygen mask, a tender gesture that is at odds with the tattooed dagger on her arm.
The man has taken Justine’s order by now and prepares the menu right here in plain view. The synthesizer on the table looks somewhat like the miniaturized model of an oil refinery. More than a hundred ampules, marked with colors and numbers, stick in the loading socket. None of the substances they contain would be illegal by itself. That’s not true of the product that will be formed in the reaction container in a few minutes. The small man and his assistant will simply break it into pieces and flush it down the toilet later. Nothing that he carries would justify an arrest. He stays clean — as long as he doesn’t sell the wrong ampule to an undercover cop.
Justine spends a few minutes on the dance floor, standing rather than dancing. Alone.
She fetches her order fifteen minutes later, pays a significant sum in cash and cuts her way through the crowd. She declines the advances of two men with an energetic shake of her head. It seems that she’s not in the mood for conversation. It’s time for me to become active. If she’d ingest her freshly mixed cocktail before I approach her, it would be very unfavorable for my work. Justine and me have a date today. It’s just that she doesn’t suspect anything.
She walks through a short hallway and leaves it through a doorless exit. The drum and base storm decays out here and the air is cool tonight. That’s why nobody else is tempted to come out.
Without the cover of the crowd I drop back somewhat and stick to the shadow of the canopy. Justine purposefully moves on to the edge of the roof. There are no barriers. There’s no border between her and the abyss. Her footsteps even begin to accelerate. For a moment I’m sure that she will simply walk on. Over the edge, into the abyss. Fourteen storeys down to the concrete.
I’m sure she’s considering it.
Both Justine and me know it’s good that her life is going to end tonight.
But not like this. Not by her own hand.
I become aware of another hallway to the left of me, illuminated by a single lightbulb that hangs down from the ceiling on a power cable. A steel staircase behind it leads down to the lower floor.
There will be no better opportunity. So I start to move. Swift, but inaudible. I’m less than ten feet behind her as she notices me, shoots me an unpertubed glance over the shoulder and declares: “Forget it, I’m not in the mood, okay?“ Her legs dangle over the edge of the roof as she says this. Fourteen storeys of a yawning void under her high heels. She still doesn’t bother to look at me.
“I see,“ I reply. “But that’s not why I’m here.“
She instinctively pushes off as the needle bores into her shoulder. At the same time I pull her away from the edge of the roof with a hand under her arm. Even now she’s no longer able to control her tongue. All that she utters is an incomprehensible babbling, not even loud.
I hear something moving behind us and spot silhouettes in the hallway. But Justine is just one of many drunk women in the arms of a man now. Nobody will be offended by a guy who takes a chance. They all would do the same.
I can’t finish it up here. The neurotoxin neutralizes the motor control almost completely. The guy who sold me the stuff calls it “voodoo tea.” I remember his spiteful, toothless grin and his rank, sweetish breath and how he told me: ”Good thing is that she will still be able to move her tongue.“ While saying this he had scratched his backside. ”Still good enough, if you know what I mean.“
It acts rapidly, but its effect diminishes just as fast. That’s important. I can’t work as long as she’s sedated.
Justine is so light and delicately built that I can drag her with me easily. It makes us look like a shattered couple. I don’t even have to set down the case while I pull her down the stairs. Her heels make a screeching noise on the steps but it doesn’t alarm anybody.
The corridor on the lower floor is almost completely dark. The light bulb has probably been installed to keep people from falling down here.
I can make out two doors on the left side and push the first one open. I’m faced with a number of other doors. Toilets. Equipped with locks.
“Whhhhaaaaaa …“ Justine just utters incoherent scraps of sound. The neurotoxin is suppressing more than 30,000 years of language evolution on the cortex.
I select a stall at the end of the row and push Justine down on her knees with my body weight, in such a way that her upper body is pressed onto the toilet seat. There’s nothing she can do about it. She’s mine.
It takes just a few minutes to prepare my operating room. I unstick the foil from the light strips on the back of the LEDs and attach them with the adhesive tapes to the side walls and the door. They bathe the stall in blazing white light. My own shadow performs a hectic shadow puppet theater on the back wall as I take the instruments from the case on my left. I can operate with them everywhere. In hotel rooms, in toilets, in the cabin of a capsule hotel, on the back seat of a car, in the cargo hold of an airplane.
”Whaaaaat?“ Justine has turned her head and gapes with horrifiedly widened eyes at the arsenal of my instruments. Ampules, filled syringes, several scalpels, even a drill and a bone saw. Tools that I need now and then.
”MOOOOO.“ It’s supposed to be a ”No“ but the failing muscles of her tongue don’t manage it. She tries to rise with all her might. In vain. I’m much too heavy and powerful for that.
I have prepared the injections hours ago. The smaller one contains sodium lauryl sulfate and some admixtures. This cocktail will raise the permeability of the blood-brain barrier. The second syringe is somewhat larger. You would think that it contains an ordinary saline solution. A simple chemical analysis would have the same result. But actually it’s something completely different.
I start with a small injection into her carotid artery. Her body convulses as the needle penetrates her carotid and I press down the plunger. Her wailing can’t be distinguished from a sensual moan by someone standing outside the door. After all, that’s exactly the reason why people come to a place like this.
”Why… doing that?“ She almost manages to express herself again. Okay, the effect of the neurotoxin is diminishing, exactly at the right time. Maybe one or two minutes more. She has to be awake.
My mouth is close to her ear. ”Justine will die tonight and we both know that it’s better this way, don’t we?“
“Who are you?“ A flawless sentence, well articulated. It’s faster with her than with many others. The adrenaline that her brain releases in a state of panic speeds the degradation of the neurotoxin.
“You would be surprised,“ I answer. “That’s exactly the question I ask myself each new day.“
“Don’t,“ she moans. “Stop, I …“
She emits a suppressed cry as I stick the larger syringe into her carotid artery and inject its content into her blood stream while pressing a hand on her mouth.
It takes effect immediately. Not a good idea to try and hold her in this moment. Justine cramps as every single muscle in her body is tensing up at the same time. Her hands cling to the toilet seat, bend it and crack the plastic at two places. She loses her grip, falls into the gap between bowl and wall and is shaken by an seizure. Her skull hits the wall. I take off my jacket, roll it up and wrap it around her head to cushion it against wall, bowl, and floor that her convulsively twitching body is dashing against over and over. She’s fighting a desperate battle inside. A battle that Justine is not going to survive, even though her brain resists with all available means. Her death takes several minutes and it’s a painful one, to say the least.
The intensity of the cramps finally subsides to slight twitches.
It will soon be over. And then she opens her eyes wide, her eyes that have become functionless now as her brain is overwhelmed by tremendous fireworks of images, noises, voices, and explosions. From the inside. And I can watch as it happens. How the paralytes on her cortex die one after the other, how a wave of glorious insight is descending upon her and makes her scream with pain.
Then it’s over.
Her open eyes are still focused on me as her body goes limp and her gaze breaks.
“Justine is dead, Kathlyn,“ I state with a low voice.
I begin to collect my instruments. Not without first disinfecting them with a spray. I will have to thoroughly clean them later in the hotel. Maybe after I’ve eaten something. Surely after I’ve slept a few hours. It has not been easy to wait for a favorable opportunity this time. I’ve been awake for more than 36 hours now.
I dial a number that the client has given me. Somebody answers. “The time has come“, I declare. “I’m sending you my exact position.“ At the touch of a button the smartphone transfers my position to the client. He will probably come here.
“Why did you do this?“ Her voice is only a whisper.
Justine is dead.
Kathlyn has woken up.
Her eyes are focused on me.
“Somebody wants you to remember.“ I close the case.
Kathlyn has decided to forget, to erase from her memory what has tortured her and start a new life instead. She has ordered the big full package. A new face, a new identity, a new job, new home and a big bright nothingness where once a dark valley full of demons has been. She has let her trauma be deleted. But also every human being that has once meant something to her.
And that’s exactly what my clients can’t accept. They want to be remembered. And so they hire me. That’s what the whole thing is about. My clients want people like Kathlyn to remember again. Remember a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter or a lover or just the guilt they want to suppress and then erase completely.
I bring back the memories, reconstruct them, revive the past and undo the expensive erasure procedure.
To locate them is the most difficult part. Especially when they leave the country. And, of course, I can’t just show a picture around and ask if someone has seen them. They have a new face and don’t even remember themselves how they looked before. They can best be identified via medical databases. The set of teeth remains the same, even with new cheeks, nose or lips. Neither do allergies nor orthopedic troubles nor rare metabolic disorders simply vanish. I can determine their current whereabouts with these clues. To be sure, I conduct a DNA test before I start the reconstruction.
The nanobots contained in the injection have switched off the paralytes, nanometer-sized machines that block undesired memories on the cortex. The patient has to help with targeting in order to finally have them also forgotten after the procedure. As well as having forgotten what has tormented them for so long.
It’s crazy. For decades we’ve developed the technology to preserve information and then we realize that we’ve done all this for the single purpose of being able to finally erase our own memory.
“I remember,“ Kathlyn whispers. “I remember it all.“ She has wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body shivers in this fetal posture. “I remember the bed, the tubes attached to the little body. Her face. How she smells. So strange. And how cold she is. And how she gets paler and paler and colder and colder. Until she is completely composed of ice. She has simply … faded … she has dissolved.“ I scan her heartbeat, the heart rate, the blood pressure. All within the normal range, considering her situation. “I think I’ve dreamed of her in recent months“, she whispers.
“No, that’s impossible.“ I slowly shake my head. “Not even when you sleep. You haven’t remembered her. You’ve just remembered the pain.“
Kathlyn couldn’t cope with the death of her little daughter and has fled. Others flee from a guilt, she has fled from the pain.
She stares into the white light. Her pupils have shrunken to the size of pinheads. “Why did you do this to me?“
I lift the shoulders. “It’s better to face your demons.“
“Why did you do this to me?“
“It’s said that the original trauma is less intense after a reconstruction. It will not hurt so much anymore.“ It’s a lie and Kathlyn knows it as well as me.
“Why?“ She looks at me. “Why do you do this to me?“
I remove the LEDs from the walls and the door.
“Why?“
Switch them off.
“Why?“
Leave her behind in the dark.
“Why did you do this to me?“ Her voice gets louder. “Why did you do this to me?“ The question turns into a call. The call turns into a shout. “Why did you do this to me? WHY DID YOU BASTARD DO THIS TO ME?“
For a few seconds I’m not sure. But my lips and my tongue have really formed the words and they’ve really left my mouth. But with such a low voice that Kathlyn can’t hear it anymore. Just a whisper.
“I’m sorry.“
Shadows engulf me.
*
It’s much too hot in my hotel room. The noise of television sets penetrates the walls. The spectrum of sound exposure includes at least one cookery show and one porn channel. And, what’s more, the hum and the clatter of the defective air conditioner.
I don’t watch TV. I haven’t eaten yet and the case with instruments that I should clean still stands closed next to the bed.
I regard myself in the high mirror next to the small bathroom. It’s as if I see myself for the first time.
We all do this. I’ve observed it again and again. Even in my clients.
I’m two years old now.
24 months and nine days, to be precise.
My memories don’t reach further back. They begin with a recovery room bathed in cold, white light and a plastic box containing all documents regarding my current life. Some knowledge has, of course, been preserved. I speak German, English, French, some Russian, but I have no clue why and when I’ve learned it. I have some medical knowledge. I’m able to deliver injections, know the difference between parietal lobes and occipital lobes but still don’t know enough to be physician. I’m quite good at electronics but not good enough to be an engineer. My most comprehensive knowledge is programming and how to circumvent security systems, but I have no clue when I’ve learned all this and who trained me. I’m about six feet tall, physically fit and know how to defend myself with bare hands. Maybe I was in the military?
I don’t know. There are scars on the back of my neck and on my thighs but when and where they were incurred is hidden behind a veil of white noise. And trying to remember leads to nausea and headaches. That’s how it’s meant to be, I guess, ’cause I’m sure that I didn’t forget by my own choice.
I have no doubt about it.
They promise a new beginning, the end of all pain, even the release of your soul. Without any side effects.
But it’s not like that. Far from it.
It’s a feeling as if you’ve just said goodbye to someone, turned away, walked a few steps and you’ve already forgotten who has been left behind. But you feel him looking after you and sometimes you hear him calling, without a voice but deep in your soul.
Turn around – no, you can’t turn around. Your legs carry you further, down an endless corridor, further and further away. How long will this feeling stay with you?
Always. It doesn’t leave you anymore. It’s like a shadow on your soul that turns the here and now into an endless dream, as if your reality is hidden behind a shapeless plasma that will burn you when you try to touch it.
My face is that of a stranger.
I’ve let my skull be scanned. It’s already more than a year ago. A physician has shown me the ceramics and plastic segments on the shot and explained that someone had worked hard to construct completely new facial bones for me. “It may even have been Asian features. But your other medical data don’t fit in with it. You’re most likely a European. Northwestern Europe. And your accent, though it’s weak, sounds German to me.“ He eyed me doubtfully. “There’s some irony in it. You’ve spent a lot of money for a new life and to erase your past and now you’re here to learn something about it?“
My smartphone sounds a faint bell note.
My client has transferred my money. This means he has personally made sure that Kathlyn remembers.
On the table next to the bed is a bottle of whiskey. The moment I open it I hear the steps.
In the bathroom, I realize. Somebody must have been waiting for me in the bathroom. I see the shape from the corner of my eye, then a punch hits my kidneys, the pain explodes and I drop to my knees. He’s over me and behind me, just like I’ve been behind Justine. I can hardly resist his grasp. He is taller than me, heavier than me. I’m not surprised by the prick into my artery. He proceeds just like I did. Two injections. And then I hear what he says. My own words, but with a strange accent:
“Somebody wants you to remember.“ A high voice, female, but not female enough. His face is mirrored in the display of the clock on the bed table.
The ladyboy.
Suddenly my muscles slacken. An anesthetic must have been mixed with the injection. Ladyboy loosens his grip. He knows that I can’t stand up on my own. I slump forward while the nanobots in my cortex attack the paralytes that have protected my soul – or what’s left of it – up to this moment. From realizing who I really am.
It can’t be so long anymore. A few minutes at most.
But it’s not how I expected it to be.
Somebody calls me, one voice first, then many. Voices that I can sometimes associate with names, sometimes not. My surroundings dissolve, buckle, turn inside out, tear apart. Places melt, mix with a hurricane of associations, smells, sounds, déjà-vus that someone is squeezing within fractions of a second through the eye of a needle into my mind. Just to remember my name is like a blade plunged into my soul. But there are many more blades. For seconds, for minutes, for days, for all eternity.
The first thing that I consciously perceive afterwards are my white knuckles that I dug into the carpet and the snapped finger nails with blood gushing out. Then there’s a strange synthetic taste all over my mouth. I open my jaws and feel how my teeth that have bitten a piece out of the cheap carpet get loose again. My mouth is filled with blood too. One tooth is broken off.
But much more has been broken than that.
The protective wall of my mind has been carried away by the flood of my memories and the insight spreads in me like molten metal, a thousand degrees hot.
Ladyboy is watching me expressionless. “It’s said that it will be easier after the reconstruction,“ he claims with a strangely feminine voice.
It’s the moment when I finally realize that this is a lie. I’ve done it to Kathlyn and he’s done it to me. “The hell it will“, I squeeze out.
It’s like it has just happened.
I still stand in front of the debris, behind me the burning convoy, the stench, the screams. It has been a ambush. Somebody has used a rocket launcher to deal with one car after the other. From one or several of the houses that stood five minutes ago where black smoke is rising from the debris now.
My uniform is completely drenched but it’s neither water nor fuel. My bladder has emptied, I think, exactly in the moment when I’ve pulled the trigger. An instinctive reaction to the movement behind the big wood fence, right next to the Humvee. The Metal-Storm on the roof follows the movements of my helmet. Just press a button to stay alive. 18,000 projectiles in ten seconds. Now I stand where the fence has been. It has vanished. Only a pile of wood splinters is left, hiding what has been hiding behind the fence. No man with a rocket launcher. The four-by-four with the shooter on top has fled in the opposite direction minutes ago. Exactly the place where smoke is rising on the horizon now. They didn’t expect that our helicopters would catch up with them.
What has moved behind the fence will never move again.
A little doll lies at my boots. The projectiles have torn it to two halves. But the little hand right next to it seems still trying to grasp it.
I vomit on the carpet of the hotel room.
Ladyboy is watching me. “You will soon feel better.“
It’s not easy but I manage to stand up on my own. “Yes, I think so. I will soon feel better.“
When I rush up to him, he ducks me deftly – but that’s exactly what I want. I can still forget. It has worked once. I’ll just make it better this time.
The window glass is no obstacle. It gives way like a water surface that you plunge into. The darkness receives me and engulfs me. It’s so peaceful up here, 24 storeys above the pavement. Ladyboy’s face and his extended arm grasping at nothing are above me. He’s shrinking fast.
It’s so pleasantly cool here, so quiet.
It’s so …
Thorsten Küper, also known under his Second Life alias Kueperpunk Korhonen, was born in Herne in 1969. He is a physicist, writer, blogger and citizen of virtual worlds. He has published stories about virtual reality, surveillance, media and technology in magazines such as c’t, Gee, Exodus or Nova and various anthologies. He has also written numerous satiric short texts that he likes to perform live as well as articles about science, virtual reality and art, among others in Telepolis. Together with his wife Kirsten Riehl aka Zauselina Rieko he is well-known for organizing literary events in the virtual world of Second Life. His first story collection Belichtungszeit was published in 2023 by the Cutting Edge imprint of InterNova’s host publisher p.machinery.