Death is no longer the end of life, but it comes at a cost. Sgt. Ana has to navigate the perils of corporate contracts to regain her memories.
Heya, Hive!
This is the final part of the story and today we'll journey with Ana as she finally unlocks her memory. At a steep cost not payable by cash. The truth doesn't end up freeing her.
The maintenance man's wrinkles softened as he focused on Ana. “Now think of a road, any really, so long you know it a road.” His fingers brushed over her face, closing her eyes. She pictured the winding yellow brick road of the old film from her youth, the one she watched over and over until the file corrupted.
After a second he said, “Look.”
Ana opened her eyes to tunnels of gold numbers and letters, dancing and merging to form buildings and streets. She stepped forward into the sepia fog. Blurred faces streamed past and signs had unknown letters or symbols. She looked at the building behind her. The fog covered it like the others and its structure was different from what the apartment’s should’ve been.
“Thank you,” she said as she let out an airless breath.
“Aye, is nothing. Call me Callan.” He tipped a hat that now rested on his head and walked off down the road.
Ana lifted her eyes to the cyan sky. The hum of a dull, off-red car parking near the curb made her skin crawl. This had happened before. She held onto the feeling of repetition, somehow knowing that if she let go, she’d lose her memories again. The driver pulled up the handbrake and shook open a newspaper. A yellow tab sat on the car’s roof.
She still had to get to the station, find out what the mission was. She stepped forward and a call came into her ear-implant, or rather the virtual version of it.
She paused. “Hello?”
“Death in Section B, apartment seven.” That same robotic voice but now she recognized it as her own. A recording so she wouldn’t forget and if she did, that she’d rediscover. The building she left wasn’t her apartment. The web way must have dropped her somewhere else. Then what had been so important there that she had put in a timed recording directing her back?
Ana rushed into the cab and barked the location to the driver. This time, the marketplace had cleared with a few stranglers shuffling around. The car stopped in front of the building glowing with a faint mist and Ana hurried into the lobby.
The elevator pinged and opened to her hallway, her white door shone brighter than the others. She inched closer, working through the screech of static in her head as the fog faded and she materialized at her apartment. The feeling of displacement slammed into her chest. The door slid open and she stepped in. Sniffles rubbed against her leg then bolted for the open door, dissolving at the threshold and re-materializing on the sofa.
Him, too.
Her home had no bodies or broken furniture, no Clean-Ups or vacuums, the table’s glass top unbroken. Only a white thread trapped in the carpet. Ana bent to pick it up, in the same spot as when she first found it. Turning the thin strand between her fingers, she walked toward the ray of sunlight penetrating through a gap between the curtains that had drawn themselves shut. It glistened. A heliogram. Sniffles’ fur, she realized. She’d been chasing, in this case, a white hair.
She let out a laugh, uneasy and embarrassed, then looked at the document sticking from the envelope on the sofa where she had left it. The document asking her to become a representative for the After-Life Program, to sell it to the unsuspecting and pitch it as an alternative reality program, omitting the death prerequisite. In exchange, the ALP vowed to grant her ‘living status’ and reinstate her living privileges. She’d able to touch real things again. To smell.
But to live like this, a fragment of the person she used to be, stuck in some perpetual self-created loop? She didn’t think she could. How many people had they tricked, and how many more would they? It wouldn’t make a difference if she helped them or not. She was one in a few billion. All they wanted was a signature.
She watched as Sniffles ran out the door and dissolve, only to reappear on the couch, jump off, then run for the door again. She chuckled and looked to the document again. This was the reality of the After-Life, just like it was in the living world. A living loop for those lucky enough to afford the program to defy the reality of their existence.
Sniffles eventually gave up and settled into a ball on Ana’s lap. She stroked his back, feeling the soft fur running under her nails and between her fingers. She had nothing to lose now. She picked up the pen and signed her name then shoved the document to the center where it jerked against a pill.
It was small and pink, round with a glossy finish, and it wasn’t the only one. About a dozen of them were scattered across the glass and on the carpet. An empty orange tube lay at one of the table’s legs and beside it was a tipped-over bottle of whiskey, the beige carpeting underneath stained.
Her hands glitched, protesting her efforts to piece it together, to reclaim her memory. Not even the ALP could’ve held this information from her, or they had let her figure it out. Ana held Sniffles closer, burying her nose into his fur until it tickled her nostrils. This was what her living self had wanted her to find, why she was guided back here. Why Callan’s eyes looked sad. He saw it when she was still blind.
She wanted to scream, lash out at him for not saying anything, then tackle the agent who knew exactly what she was going to do to herself and not stopping her, to rewind time and choose not to take the pills. Instead, she kept holding onto Sniffles who purred like nothing in the world was wrong and hadn’t once tried to be free of her arms.
The redacted memory peeled its blur away as the document fizzled out of sight. She remembered what happened, why she’d done this to herself. In a rush of fragmented sounds and thoughts, the memories flooded over her mind’s eye. She smiled.
She could almost feel the man’s blood dripping from her chin again, the slick grease between her knuckles making her fingers slide against the rubber handle of the axe still buried in his back. She could smell the coppery aroma of decay she had become familiar with when investigating the scenes of his victims.
She closed her eyes and saw his slumped body on the filthy cement of the alley she had trapped him in after a chase from his latest victim’s house, black liquid spilling from his body like lava, glistening under the full moon and the bright city lights.
Justice. That’s what she had told herself as she raced back to her new apartment. What she’d repeated whiled she scrubbed her skin raw in the shower painted red. And what she consoled herself with the day after, between gulps of whiskey, her stomach filled with painkillers. It was what the ALP agent agreed with and gave her a discount for, on behalf of his dead sister, the first of seventeen.
Holoscreens popped up against the wall opposite her, blaring the current news. Crime everywhere. She had done her part, she told herself, the rest was up to everyone else. Ana sank back into the couch with Sniffles perched on her tummy, purring away the remaining guilt she felt for taking a life. It was justice. She held her smile, forcing it to stay where it wanted to frown. She had to keep it, chanting what she told herself over and over until it echoed through her mind like a song she couldn’t get rid of.
Her smile gave up fighting and stayed in place. She stroked Sniffles’ back, watching the hairs fly off and evaporate in the air while the holoscreens continued to cover the events of the worlds falling slowly apart. She was only one in a few billion, it wouldn’t make a difference if she helped them or not.
“Justice,” she said to Sniffles who continued to purr. She never learned what the man’s name was. She never bothered to care. The worlds were a slightly better place without him either way. A pity he wasn’t wearing red shoes.
