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Ironically enough, the problems began when another woman entered the scene. The attention that I was getting didn’t just come from nightclub promoters, punters, and idiots on the street, you see. Women were suddenly finding me rather attractive, too. It was the elevated profile, of course. I know that. I was under no illusion. I consider myself to be semi-good looking, but I knew that these women simply enjoyed being part of the sensational buzz that surrounded me.
However, despite my knowledge of this, I certainly wasn’t in the habit of turning them away. Yeah, I had some fun, in case you’re wondering. I had a few one-night stands, but so what? Does that make me bad? Well, if it does, so be it. This all changed one night, anyway, when I met a darling of a young lady in one of the upmarket venues in District 7.
This place was more of a restaurant, really, not a nightclub. It was full of posh-looking customers sitting at tables piled up with food and bottles of wine, most of them wearing button-up shirts and shiny shoes, and all that kind of thing. It made me a bit nervous, actually, performing in there. There were definitely no crass posters of me hanging up in this place, it was all tablecloths and chandeliers and framed abstract paintings and the like.
Did they actually know who I was? The manager of the place phoned me up one Thursday afternoon, offering me a one-hour slot at the weekend. I didn’t ask too many questions, and neither did he. Whether he’d seen my NeuroStar video or not, I had no idea. When I walked through the door, I knew right away that I was going to have to omit some of my edgier jokes. The routine I was doing at the time included jokes like: What do you call a leper in the bath? Porridge! I mean, come on! How could I have come out with a gag like that in front of a group of wine-sipping, tie-wearing, upmarket toffs?
It was a nerve-racking gig, to say the least, but I got through it in one piece. I got a few laughs, as well. To my surprise, they enjoyed my joke about an insecure husband: ‘Tell me something that will make me happy and sad at the same time,’ said a man, to his wife. ‘Your penis is bigger than your brother’s,’ she replied. They’re not all bad, you know, these posh types. It’s just this overly-sophisticated impression that they sometimes give off, that’s all. It can put you on the defensive back foot. Anyway, I even hung around for a while after my show was over, and ordered a glass of cabernet sauvignon from the bar. Pretty tasty, I must say, although not as tasty as the aforementioned darling of a young lady who came over and approached me.
Picture the scene: the stool I was sitting on had red velvet upholstery, the bartender was wearing a silk waistcoat, there were chandeliers up on the ceiling which I presume were crystal, glass bowls full of olives and cheese were artistically positioned along the polished surface of the bar, and then, to top it all off, a classy-looking young lady came over and stood next to me! What was going on? Was the world about to end?
‘Hello, I’m Emily,’ she said, with a toothy smile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a toothpaste commercial.
‘Nice to meet you. I’m Reed.’
Again, I felt silly saying this, because she obviously had just watched my performance, and hence knew my name, but whatever.
‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Not at all. Take a seat.’
‘I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your show.’
Her dark eyes were melting me, and a sweet scent of expensive perfume emanated from her pale neck, making me dizzy with lust.
‘Thank you very much. I don’t usually perform in places like this, but I quite enjoyed it.’
She then said, ‘You were wonderful.’
The way she said it, dear reader, you wouldn’t believe. She was one of these women who oozed sexual attraction from every single pore, from every single movement of her well-proportioned body, and from every single fibre of her glorious being. Was I dreaming? Was this really happening? An upmarket stunner was coming on to me, giving me the movie star treatment! Oh, how my life had changed.
After buying her a drink, we chatted at the bar for a good hour or so. The usual small talk, I suppose, but every second of it was charged with an incredible spark of energy that flowed between us, every meaningless nicety dripping with a mutual, but unspoken, erotic connection. I didn’t dare ask her to come to my apartment, or anything like that; a woman of this caliber would never agree to such a thing on a first meeting. But of course, I got her phone number. I simply had to. Let’s put it this way: if I’d left that place without doing so, I would have deserved to have been hung, drawn, and quartered.
We went out on a couple of dates shortly after that. I took her to a pricey coffee shop in Central District on the first day, then we went to a semi-posh buffet place in District 3 for the second date. We seemed to click quite well, despite our class differences, and I could sense a relationship developing. But here’s the thing: I slowly gathered, during the time we spent together, that she had no idea whatsoever about my online fame. She was oblivious to the viral video that I was a part of, and clueless to the fact that ten million people worldwide had seen me getting it on with two women at once (in actual fact, the figure was more like eleven million at this point).
More dates followed, and over the weeks and months, we grew closer and closer. My feelings for this girl intensified, her sex appeal losing none of its intensity, no matter how often I saw her. However, during this blissful romantic development between us, an unsettling panic was brewing inside me. How would she react if she saw the threesome video? Would she get angry? Would she leave me and walk away? These were the thoughts that haunted me as I lay in my bed at night, these were the questions that deprived me of sleep while Emily and I formed a loving bond.
Tell me: what would you have done, dear reader and valued friend, if you were in my shoes? It’s obvious, isn’t it? There was only one thing for me to do—delete the video!
So, that’s exactly what I did. Pulling the sweaty bedsheets off of me one night, after tossing and turning without sleep for at least two hours, stressing about the ridiculous situation, I grabbed my phone and opened up the NeuroStar app. With a few taps and scrolls, there it was, the infamous viral sex video right there on the screen of my smartphone, with all the astronomical viewing figures and share figures displayed underneath it. After humming and hawing for a while, wondering what kind of impact the deletion of such a thing might have on my comedic career, I plucked up some blind courage and pressed the delete button.
It felt surprisingly good; soothing, even. It was like getting rid of some incriminating evidence, throwing a huge weight off my shoulders. I even uninstalled the NeuroStar app, for good measure.
After the deed was done, I returned to bed, pulled the sheets back over me, and slept the way a man does when he has a clear conscience and a clear head.
‘No more NeuroStar,’ I muttered to myself, in the dark—or so I thought.
* * *
If I remember rightly, and I think I do, a few days later I performed at a club called Seventeen Saloon. It’s like a rock tribute band place. You see these middle-aged rocker types in there with ponytails and leather jackets, and all that. I pulled out my filthy material, and put on a decent show. I had everyone in stitches with this joke about a nun who...oh, you probably don’t want to hear it. Anyway, the club was cheering and crying out for more, which was good enough for me.
After it was all over, I ordered a drink at the bar, as I often do, and watched this band perform a couple of Guns and Roses songs. They were terrible, if I’m honest. The band members were too young and geeky to pull it off properly, and it just didn’t come together right. After the second song, I pulled out my phone and began to check my emails out of boredom.
Most of my emails were the usual spammy shite, of course. “You’ve been selected for this!” “You’ve won this new voucher!” “You’re eligible for a loan!” “I am an African prince, and I have $3 million that I need to transfer to a bank account.” I mean, seriously, who falls for this nonsense? Anyway, I was scrolling down through this sea of spam and garbage, deleting them one by one, when I came across a sender’s email address that looked something like this: admin@neurostar.com
Alarm bells started ringing, dear reader, as soon as I saw it. It was like a premonition, or an intuition, whatever they call it. I had this uncomfortable feeling rising up in my gut, like a nervous tickle that I didn’t like one bit.
I opened the email.
Transcribing the entire email here, word for word, would bore you too much. Instead, I’ll simply tell you the gist of what it said. In basic terms, the NeuroStar Corporation (and by this point, I was very aware that it was a corporation because it said so in almost every sentence in the email) had made it very clear, using extremely formal and overly intimidating language, that I had an obligation to re-upload my memory onto their platform post haste (within 14 days, to be precise). It was explained to me in this stern email, using this complicated legal jargon that big companies like to use, that there’s this clause in the terms and conditions of the NeuroStar contract (the contract that everybody agrees to by ticking a little box, without reading a single word of it, just like I did) which states that if the company wishes to retain a certain video clip and keep it on the website, it shall remain on the website whether the creator of the clip likes it or not.
I’m paraphrasing here, of course. It wasn’t worded like that, it was written with these overly-technical phrases and sentences like: “The company retains the right under certain circumstances to...blah, blah, blah.” And: “As stated in section 14 of the user agreement, by uploading content to the NeuroStar Corporation platform, the user is giving the company permission to...blah, blah, blah.” And: “If the clip in question is not re-uploaded to the NeuroStar platform within 14 days of this correspondence, the company is legally entitled to...blah, blah, blah.” The email was full of sentences like that, you know? All that technical jargon, the stuff that gives you a headache after about two seconds. But what I’m trying to tell you here, dear valued reader and friend, is that I was royally shitting myself. It was rapidly dawning on me that if I didn’t re-upload my memory onto the NeuroStar app within the given timeframe, I’d be in some pretty serious trouble.
Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be wondering why NeuroStar bothered kicking up such a fuss about this video. The reason is very simple: money. Money makes the world go round, as they say, and the internet world is no different. My video was making the company some serious dough through ad revenue and stuff like that, and popular videos also help draw people towards the website and spend more time on it, resulting in more subscriptions and clicks and ads and whatever else. In other words, my viral video was a money-spinner, and they didn’t want to let it go. I hit them where it hurt that night when I deleted the video, and business people don’t like to be hit like that.
But look, here’s the thing: it’s my memory. My memory belongs in my head, not in some businessman’s pocket. How can a corporation own someone’s memory? That doesn’t seem right at all, does it? And don’t look at me like that. I know what you’re about to say. You’re about to say, ‘Well, Reed, you did choose to share your memory with the rest of the world. Your memory can’t be that precious and personal to you if you chose to share it like that. OK, smartass, I suppose you’ve got a point, but...still, how can it be right? Even if I chose to share it, surely I should have a right to take it down when I feel like doing so?
‘Are you OK, pal? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Looking up from the email, I saw this rocker-type bloke leaning towards me with a drink in his hand. He had a concerned look on his face, like he was worried about me in some way.
‘Err, yeah, I’m OK mate. Thanks,’ I replied.
‘The beer isn’t that bad, is it?’ he joked.
It must’ve been weird for the man to see me sitting there with this mortified expression, because I’d been up on stage telling jokes twenty minutes earlier.
‘No, no, it’s not that. I just, err...I just need to get some air.’
Jumping off my stool, I literally ran out of Seventeen Saloon, overcome with this horrible nausea.
Uploading that video didn’t seem like a very good idea anymore.
* * *
How did I respond to this threatening email? I hear you ask. What action did I take? Well, I did what any other law-abiding, responsible citizen would do in such circumstances: I deleted the email, and pretended that I’d never seen it. Don’t tut at me like that! You would’ve done the same thing, wouldn’t you? Be honest. My planned alibi, in case I needed one, was that the email had landed in my spam folder. Simple.
Meanwhile, Emily and I continued to meet every week, going to restaurants and coffee shops and stuff, and our relationship blossomed. I began to miss her presence when she wasn’t there, sending her messages every single day, and thinking about her all the time. OK, look, I won’t beat about the bush, I’ll just come out and say it, shall I? I was falling in love with her. There it is. Are you satisfied now? Funny, sleazy Reed Blagden was falling in love! It’s crazy, I know, but I was. She was the first truly attractive woman I’d ever dated, and it was having a strong effect on me. She had class, real class, and this delicate presence that did something to the core of my being. I’m not entirely sure what she saw in me, maybe the whole celebrity thing swept her up a bit, you know? Whatever. I wasn’t complaining.
With a certain degree of mental effort, I managed to convince myself that the NeuroStar business was nothing to worry about. My entire focus was on Emily, and when I wasn’t with her, I concentrated on writing some new jokes and observational material to include in my new act. Delusion will only get you so far, though, and after about two and a half weeks, another email landed in my inbox.
No prizes for guessing who it was from, I’m afraid. And this time, the threatening legal jargon from my good friends over at the NeuroStar Corporation had ramped up a notch. This time, I was seeing words like: “breach”, “misdemeanor”, “contractual obligation”, and “prosecution”. There were also sentences like: “The company retains the right to take action against you...”, “Your lack of correspondence grants us authority to...”, and ‘We have forwarded this case to the Mapharno City Police Department”.
It was this last sentence, dear reader, that had me shaking in my boots. The Mapharno City Police Department? Really? We’re talking about social media here, for crying out loud! The police? But you know what? Despite all the fancy words and scary talk, and despite the fact that I was a bit scared at this point, I still didn’t quite believe that a corporation like that would actually take action against me. It was all a bit far-fetched for me, a bit too fantastical for me to truly accept.
Besides, there was nothing I could really do at this point. The 14-day window had passed, and they were claiming that the case had been forwarded on to the police. Were they bluffing? Was it simply a case of corporate bullying? A big corporation trying to bully a powerless citizen into doing something they weren’t legally obligated to do?
That’s what I kept telling myself.
* * *
Guess what? They weren’t bluffing. The emails from NeuroStar fizzled out, which came as a great relief, but they were soon replaced by emails and letters from my local district constabulary. The bastards actually went ahead and reported me to the police. Can you believe that? They actually did. The letters arriving at my door had these official stamps on the envelopes and everything, and the letters themselves were printed on this creamy, quality paper that gave off the impression that they weren’t messing around.
I should, at this point in the story, tell you a little bit more about my apartment. I basically live in a small room within a large shared building. There are ten rooms within the building, which consists of three floors, and my landlady, Meredith, lives down on the ground floor with her cats. I live on the second floor. The building is situated down a narrow alleyway in District 1, and is accessed by a set of metal shutters. Sounds shady, doesn’t it? I suppose it is, really, but I’ve never had any dramas. The shutters open up to a communal downstairs lobby, where all residents can leave their shoes and bicycles and stuff.
Meredith’s a decent woman, and she’s looked after me well enough during the few years that I’ve lived there. She’s in her sixties, has been a widow for several years, and she spends most of her time watching daytime TV and treating her cats as though they were human babies, or something.
I’d never had a problem with her before, and neither had she with me, but when the postman started delivering these letters with the MCPD stamp on them, her attitude towards me altered somewhat.
‘This arrived for you today,’ she said one afternoon, as I opened the shutters and walked into the downstairs lobby.
She was holding the first letter that the police had sent me, the big stamp clearly displayed on the top, and there was this distrustful glint in her eyes that I’d never seen before.
‘Thank you, Meredith,’ I said, taking the letter from her.
She didn’t say anything the first time, but after the second and third letters arrived, her silent concern became vocal. She caught me downstairs one morning, as I was going out to get some bread.
‘Is everything OK, Reed?’
‘Yes,’ I said, with a nervous chuckle.
‘I couldn’t help but notice you’re getting a lot of letters from the MCPD.’
‘Oh, that. Yeah, don’t worry about that. It’s fine. I, err...I lost my bag the other week, and I reported it missing.’
Meredith took a sharp intake of breath, displaying a kind of motherly concern that she has now and then for her residents, her voice softening. ‘Your bag? Oh, dear. Was there anything valuable in it?’
‘Err, well, my laptop was in there.’
‘Your laptop? Oh, no! Do you think you’ll get it back?’
Thinking on my feet, I then spent the next five minutes or so fabricating this lame story about me working with the police to try and locate the whereabouts of my laptop. It was pathetic, but I think she believed it.
In reality, though, the letters were formal requests for me to report to my local police station in order to discuss the charge that’d been put against me. My response: avoidance.
Ignorance is bliss, as they say. Letters get lost in the post, don’t they? How could they be so sure that I was receiving their letters? Anything can happen to a letter. They can fall out of a postman’s bag, they can get chewed up by dogs, they can get lost in sorting offices, etc, etc. Irresponsible? Maybe. Stupid? Perhaps. But look: those assholes over at the NeuroStar Corporation were taking the piss, and I wasn’t going to bow down to them that easily.
How many letters were there in total? Let me think...about four or five, if I remember rightly. They got progressively sterner and more authoritative each time, of course, but every time I opened one of them I thought, Fuck those wankers. It’s my memory!
Things finally came to a head late one evening, after I returned home from a gig in District 10. I was taking my shoes off downstairs, when I heard a voice behind me.
‘There was a police officer here this afternoon, Reed.’
I turned to see my landlady, Meredith, standing behind me, looking cold and cross.
‘Really? Have they found my laptop?’
‘No, I don’t think they have, Reed.’ She looked insulted at this point. ‘In fact, he didn’t seem to know anything about a laptop when I asked him.’
‘Huh, that’s typical. You know how they operate sometimes. The officer they sent here probably wasn’t informed about the full details.’
‘He didn’t look very pleased, Reed. And he told me to tell you that you need to report to the station ASAP.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, trying to look bright and happy. ‘This sounds promising.’
I could tell that she really, really wanted to press me for some details, to ask me what this was really all about, but my innocent act was played well enough to hold her back.
‘I’ll get on the phone to them as soon as I get upstairs,’ I lied. ‘Find out what’s going on.’
‘Yes, I think you should,’ she said, before returning to her whining cats.
This was the turning point for me. Things were escalating to a whole new level, and I knew that I had to take some kind of action. Keeping a slow, casual pace, I climbed the stairs to my room, but as soon as the door was closed, I found a bag and began frantically stuffing clothes and toiletries into it. Once that was done, I quietly went back downstairs and walked out into the alley without making a sound.
Thankfully, it was a warm, dry night, so I could comfortably work out what I was going to do as I traipsed along the alley towards the main road. My first instinct was to phone someone I knew, and ask to sleep on their sofa for the night. It was the obvious thing to do, but as I mentally went through my list of friends, the idea fell apart. Most of my friends are club owners, of course, and...well, I won’t lie to you, dear reader, nightclub owners are quite renowned for dabbling in dodgy business. Even better, you may be thinking, but the thing is, I didn’t want to lead the police to my friends’ doorsteps. I was technically a fugitive at this point, and none of my friends needed that kind of hassle.
Luke, for example, often keeps counterfeit money in the cellar of his place in District 5. Rog used to sell ecstasy pills from the office of Club Flamingo, and everybody else I could think of broke the law in some way or another. Calling Emily and asking her was out of the question, because she’d naturally wonder why I couldn’t sleep at my apartment. I mean, shit, this whole mess occurred due to the fact that I was hiding something from her, so it would’ve been ridiculous of me to head over to her place.
Extreme situations call for extreme measures, I think that’s how the saying goes. In the end, I decided that I was going to have to rough it for the night. There’s this big abandoned block of flats on the other side of District 1, about a twenty-minute walk from my apartment, and I decided to head over there. Bit of a drastic move, some might say, but I needed somewhere quiet and secluded so that I could work out what I was going to do.
If I could make it over there without being spotted, I would have a decent amount of time to think.
This derelict block is right on the corner of a main road, which was not ideal, but I managed to haul my ass over the security fence during a brief lull in passing traffic, and I don’t think anyone saw me.
I’ve got this weird fascination for derelict buildings. Perhaps that’s the real reason I ended up over there that night. There’s something mysterious about them, isn’t there? Seeing these crumbling structures and knowing that people used to live there, sleep there, eat there, and go back there after work everyday, it...it fills me with this strange awe. Climbing up the stairwell of this place, I looked around at the flaking paintwork and decrepit lightbulbs dangling on tattered cords, trying to imagine what it all looked like back in the day.
Splintered doorways led through to old dusty apartments that used to be people’s homes, fallen TV sets covered in rat shit, frayed sofas with spider’s webs between the cushions, stray cats nibbling on bones from takeaway boxes, that kind of thing. Call me weird if you like, but I love all that. I mean, one day there’s a building that people call home, they cook there, bathe there, drink there, fuck there, get dressed for work in the morning there, and then...it all turns to dust, a dusty shell with cockroaches and cats and insects and fugitives wandering about the place.
Anyway, I digress.
Reaching the top floor of this block, I was drawn towards a hollowed-out apartment on the north side. The living room windows of this place were gone, along with a section of wall on either side of the frame, and I was greeted by this panoramic cityscape as I walked towards the edge of the room. Mapharno City was laid out before me in all its nighttime glory, and it damn near took my breath away.
Say what you want about cities and skyscrapers, about how they pollute and ruin the environment and what have you, but you can’t deny that they look good at night. There’s nothing quite like a gleaming, luminescent cityscape at night, I tell you. I was lost in it for quite some time, dear reader, meditating on the flashing lights of the vast metropolis, feasting my eyes on the yellows and whites and blues, momentarily forgetting about the awful mess that I’d gotten myself into.
My respite was broken by the sound of my phone ringing.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that you should switch off your smartphone if you’re on the run from the police, so it appears that I may be cerebrally challenged. Pulling the bloody thing from my pocket, I expected to see an unknown number, a police station landline or something, but when I looked at the screen I realised it was actually worse than that—it was Emily.
This was worse because if it had been the fuzz, I could’ve simply not answered it. I could’ve let it ring and ring, and then switched it off afterwards. But I couldn’t do that with Emily, no way. I had to pick up as I always did, and with that came the possibility of having to answer a few awkward questions.
A day in the life of Reed Blagden. You wouldn’t want to be me, I tell you that now.
‘Hello?’ I said, as calmly as possible.
‘Hello, baby. How are you?’
That voice. That smooth, silky voice. It made it all worthwhile.
‘I’m fine, baby. How are you?’
‘I’m OK. Do you want to go somewhere tonight? Have a drink somewhere?’
My thoughts were racing at this point, as you can imagine. What was I going to say? Should I be honest with her? No, that would be relationship suicide. Should I be semi-honest with her? Maybe. Perhaps I could explain the situation, but say that the video in question was something a bit more innocent, something non-sexual? Hhmm, a definite maybe. On the other hand, should I just outright lie, and say that I’m too tired to go out tonight? Pretend that none of this is happening?
Which option do you think I chose? Again, no prizes for guessing.
‘Babe, I’d love to see you tonight, but I’m absolutely shattered. I had a tough crowd tonight, minimal laughs, and—’
‘It’s OK, I understand. Get some rest.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I need. I need a good night’s sleep, that’s all. I tell you what, let’s go out tomorrow night and I’ll treat you to something nice. How about that?’
‘That sounds nice, honey. Recharge your batteries for me, and give me a call tomorrow.’
‘Will do. Love you, babe.’
‘Love you, too. Sleep well.’
Sure, I felt a bit bad, but sometimes it’s easier to just tell a little white lie, isn’t it? I switched the phone off after that, then sat down on the concrete floor near the crumbling window frame, looking out at the sky, pondering my situation. Weighing up my options, I considered what the consequences might’ve been if I handed myself into the police. What exactly did they plan on doing, anyway? Were they going to force me to re-upload my memory? Were they going to pull out a set of those stupid Neurodes, and aggressively stick them on my head? Was that even legal?
It probably was, I concluded. Technology was becoming king in Mapharno City, an unstoppable force. As I’ve already mentioned, people live their lives on social media in this city, and the online world is becoming more important than the offline world. They call it Dataism, I believe, and several scholars and commentators had already speculated that this new way of life would soon take over the land, including the legal system. I’m digressing, I’m getting way off track here, but what I’m saying is that in all probability, the MCPD would have the power to force me to re-upload my memory against my will.
Frightening, isn’t it? The authorities having the power to get inside your head like that. Gazing out at the city lights and the purple night sky, I thought about this long and hard. Entering your brain, without your consent. Tapping into your grey matter, even though you’ve said no. This techno-absurdity was occupying my thoughts for a long while, this digital dilemma, and I began to consider the prospect of me staying on the run forever, living the life of a professional, nomadic fugitive.
Another part of me, however, was looking at the problem from a different angle. The authorities could tap into my brain and retrieve a memory, I reasoned, but they couldn’t control what that memory was. The current technology didn’t grant them the ability to enter my thoughts and look around; instead, they could only force the Neurodes to my head, and command me to summon up the desired memory myself. This allowed for a certain amount of deception on my part.
Feeling as though I was on the brink of coming up with a solution to my problem, I continued to think along these lines. As I did so, I recalled an article that I’d read a long time ago concerning the accuracy of our memories. Hey, you’re giving me that look again. Yes, I know, I’m a guttersnipe comedian; I’m a dirtbag with loose morals. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t read now and again, OK? Hear me out.
This article that I read, it was about the unreliability of the human brain, and how our memories are often rather inaccurate. It was pretty convincing. For example, have you ever re-watched a film that you haven’t seen in years, and a certain scene comes up that you think you remember well? It could be a scene where two people are sitting at a table talking, or something like that. You might remember one of the characters wearing a tie, but when you re-watch the scene, you notice they’re not wearing a tie. Or, you might remember one of them saying, “Marvellous job you did there”, but when the scene comes on you hear them say, “Fantastic job you did there”. I’ve heard this phenomenon being referred to as The Mandela Effect. Some people explain it by claiming that we live in The Matrix or something, but that’s bullshit. It’s due to the fact that our brains play tricks on us.
That’s just one example, too. There’s also the Pollyanna Principle. This is about how we tend to forget how bad certain experiences were in the past. We often recall our past experiences through rose-tinted spectacles, believing that our lives are better than they actually are. It’s a psychological survival mechanism, I suppose. It’s there to keep our spirits up. On top of that, there’s also the scientifically-proven fact that eyewitness court statements are often unreliable. Certain experiments have been carried out in the past, where the test subjects have claimed they saw a red jumper even though it was blue, or they saw a person with short hair even though they had long hair, you know?
You can take that look off your face now. Just remember: despite my appearance and demeanour, there is a touch of sophistication in me.
So there I was, a fugitive sitting in this mouldy carcass of a building, trying to figure out how I was going to get myself out of this pickle, when this article popped into my head. After another moment’s thought, I put two and two together and realised that the memory of my threesome that I’d uploaded onto NeuroStar probably wasn’t very accurate at all. In all probability, it was a juiced-up, over-inflated, highly exaggerated version of what really happened that night. That’s the honest truth.
This was bad news for my ego, because it meant that my wild night of passion probably wasn’t as wild as I remembered it to be. It was good news in another sense, though, because if I could somehow retrieve an accurate memory of what happened that night, the resulting memory would be a less exciting, dulled-down version of the original one. The beauty of this was that a dulled down version of the memory would produce a less valuable video clip, a boring clip that would generate much less buzz and excitement than the first one. This, in turn, would reduce the likelihood of Emily stumbling upon it by accident. Furthermore, the authorities would have to let me go! I could hand myself in, claim that I was willing to re-upload my memory, then, when push came to shove, I’d upload the drab, boring version. NeuroStar could then upload it to their platform if they so wished, but so what? It would probably flop.
These things are always easier said than done, though, aren’t they? Even though I had a fairly decent plan, I had no idea how I was going to access my memory in a more accurate way. I tried the obvious first. I closed my eyes and thought about the memory in a more refined, acute manner, straining to remember any small details that may have escaped me the first time. It kind of worked, but not really. I mean, I remembered a couple of extra details about the night, like the fact that there was a red lampshade next to the bed, and that I told the girls one of my sleaziest, dirtiest jokes when we first got to the room in an attempt to loosen them up. I suppose you want to know what the joke is, don’t you? OK, it was this: What’s the difference between a Catholic priest and a zit? A zit will wait until you’re sixteen before it comes on your face. Bad taste? Maybe. But hey, they found it funny.
None of this was enough, however; nowhere near enough. The main events were still the same in my mind, the same images and snapshots that were there before, most of them, in all likelihood, gross exaggerations of the truth. What I’m saying here, is that I couldn’t improve upon the memory in any significant way on my own.
Sensing that I was getting nowhere fast, I let out a sigh of despair and slumped back on the floor. I was lying there on the dust and shit, feeling sorry for myself, staring up at the filthy ceiling. Falling into this sense of resignation and despair, I lay there like that for quite a while, looking up moronically at the mould patches above my head. Every now and then a lorry or a bus whizzed by outside on the main road, and there would be a bright flash whizzing across the ceiling as the headlights bounced around the room, then everything would fall into darkness again. It was quite soothing, in a way. Darkness, then light. Darkness, then light.
Now, this may sound a bit silly, but this intermittent light show on the ceiling reminded me of something. It reminded me of an eccentric, odd little club I used to perform in called The Crypt. It was over in District 4, and they always used to have dark-themed events in there. The management team was into gothic stuff, I think, or anything sinister and eerie. And they always made an effort when it came to lighting. When I performed there a couple of times, I felt as though I was in a theatre, not a club. Funny place, it was.
The acts were even funnier. I don’t mean that in the humourous sense, either, I mean that they were weird. The act that I had to follow the first night I was there was a hypnotist act. What a freaky bastard! Mark Mesmer, his name was. Pretty good name for a hypnotist, actually, I must admit. And he did his job well, too. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, his hair immaculately combed and gelled, contact lenses in his eyes that gave them a reptilian appearance, he had people up on stage clutching onto the arms of chairs because they thought they were balancing on the edge of a cliff, or looking around in a state of panic because they thought a lion was lurking somewhere nearby. It was hilarious to watch.
We had a chat after my stand-up routine was over, and he was telling me more about his work. A lot of his income came from curing people of phobias. Can you believe that? People used to pay him for that kind of stuff. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, as I was thinking back to this odd club, I wondered whether I still had Mark Mesmer’s number on my phone. Hypnotists are good at helping people retrieve lost memories, aren’t they? That was my understanding.
Pulling myself up to a sitting position, I switched my phone back on and scrolled through my numbers, searching for Mark Mesmer’s.
It was there.
You must remember, dear reader, that I hadn’t spoken to this man for quite some time, so I was hesitant to call him late at night. How could I not call him, though, when I had such a huge problem on my hands? I checked the time: 22.07pm. Quite late for a weekday, but not ridiculously late. After a bit of indecision and mental debate, I took a deep breath and pressed call.
He answered after a few rings, and the conversation went something like this:
‘Hello?’
‘Hello Mark, it’s Reed.’
A short pause, then, ‘Reed?’
‘Reed, the comedian. The stand-up comedian. I met you in The Crypt that time, remember?’
With slight confusion lacing his words, the hypnotist replied, ‘Ah, Reed! Hello. How are you?’
This had to be played carefully and properly, dear reader. I couldn’t tell the man that I was on the run from the police, could I? I didn’t know him well enough. On the other hand, why would I be calling him during the night if everything was hunky-dory?
‘I’m fine, Mark. Well, kind of fine. Sorry to call you out of the blue like this, but I need your help.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t quite know how to put this, but...do you have any experience in helping people retrieve lost memories?’
‘Memory retrieval? Yeah, I’ve done that kind of thing before.’
Music to my ears, dear reader. Music to my ears.
‘I need you to help me with a memory of mine. I want to remember a certain event in crystal clear clarity, as sharp as possible.’
Naturally, at this point, the hypnotist Mark Mesmer enquired about the nature of the memory in question. This is where the lies began, although my story was only a twisted, edited version of the truth.
I told Mark that I’d uploaded a saucy memory to NeuroStar, and that my girlfriend had then seen it and dumped me. I now wanted to contact one of the girls in the memory, but I needed to remember what her address was by recalling every detail of what happened that night. Initially, I considered the idea of completely omitting the NeuroStar element from the story, and simply telling him that I’d split with my girlfriend and wanted to find this other woman. This could’ve worked, but I knew that there was a strong possibility that Mark, being a worker on the nightclub circuit, had seen or heard about the NeuroStar video already, or would soon do so.
After digesting this madness, pausing again over the phone, Mr Mesmer said, ‘When would you like to come over?’
What do you think I said to that, dear reader? A week next Tuesday?
* * *
That’s right, I headed straight over there like a bullet out of a gun. That’s quite an ironic way of putting it, too, because bullets could’ve come my way if the police had spotted me. I was still completely unwilling to comply at this point, a rebel of the techno-authoritarian system, and I wouldn’t have stopped for any kind of officer.
As it turned out, though, the journey from the abandoned building to Mark Mesmer’s apartment was smooth and uneventful. I paid cash for a taxi driver to take me over to District 2, where he lives, and I arrived on his doorstep after about twenty minutes. District 2 is pretty upmarket, a well-to-do area. It’s a rich part of Mapharno City, even more so than District 7, and it has this quaint tranquility about it.
When I saw his pad, I was instantly jealous. After buzzing through a security gate, I walked up a set of marble stairs and knocked on his door. The sound of muffled footsteps grew closer, then the door opened up. Mark Mesmer stood there before me, wearing a loose cloth outfit, looking like some kind of charismatic, dark prince.
‘Come in, Reed,’ he smiled.
Swanky, I thought, as I walked around and took the place in. Expensive furniture was dotted around, framed figurative paintings were hung on the walls, candles were burning here and there, and an impressive-looking bookshelf took up an entire wall of the living room. I couldn’t see any evidence of a woman living there, but at the same time, I could tell that the apartment had seen its fair share of female visitors.
‘Good to see you again, Reed.’
Mark stood there in the living room, after having closed the front door, and I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him in clear light. The light in the apartment was quite dim, don’t get me wrong, what with the candles and that, but for the first time, I could see his face without colourful strobes flashing across it. The reptilian contact lenses were absent, too, and I could see that he had piercing blue eyes, the colour of sun-illuminated waves.
‘Likewise. Nice pad you have here, Mark. Very impressive.’
‘Thanks very much. Do you want a drink?’
I said yes, and he told me to make myself at home while he prepared two cups of green tea. Once we were settled, he gave me a rundown of the procedure, and all that it entailed. After everything was explained, I got myself onto this white leather sofa in the corner of the room and waited while Mark made some preparations.
Sitting on a chair behind me, out of sight, he said, ‘Like I said, what I’m going to do first is put you into a very light trance. An altered state of mind.’
With my eyes closed, I mumbled, ‘OK.’
‘Then I’m going to walk you through your memory, one step at a time.’
‘OK, Mark. Go right ahead.’
Without any further messing around, Mark began whispering words into my ear, putting me into a more suitable frame of mind. I was hearing things like: ‘As you sink down into your thoughts...’, and ‘Going deeper and deeper into yourself...’, and ‘Falling more and more inside your mind.’ Mark Mesmer has this seamless voice, too, that makes you feel really calm and relaxed whenever you hear it. This, coupled with the vocab that he was using, had me falling into this cosy, trance-like state.
After a few minutes of this, Mark’s voice seemed like it was drifting down to me from way up above somewhere. It felt like I was down in the depths of some deep cave, and he was up on ground level.
‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ came the voice from above.
‘I...I was at a bar.’
‘Which bar were you at?’
‘I was at Bar 5.’
‘Whereabouts in the bar did you first see the girls?’
‘I first saw them when I was up on stage, telling my jokes.’
‘What time was it when you first saw them?’
‘It must’ve been about...’
This is how it went, dear reader. Mark asked me question after question, guiding me through my memory of the night in a very precise, calculating manner. And because everything was being done properly and thoroughly, I was seeing things in a very different way. It was like being in an HD memory, everything in glorious technicolour, forgotten details and nuances bouncing up into my consciousness.
It became a bit embarrassing, I suppose, when we got to the hotel room part. He was asking me things like: ‘What colour was their underwear?’ ‘Which one got undressed first?’ ‘Who was the first one to get on top?’ ‘Did you use lube?’ ‘What positions did you do?’ ‘Did either of them achieve orgasm?’ ‘Which one orgasmed first?’ There were times, dear reader and valued friend, while I was hearing these questions drift down to me in my cave, when I thought he might’ve been having me on, joking around with me. But no, I honestly think that he was simply doing the job to the best of his ability, prising every last detail out of me as I’d requested. He was this all-knowing, trustworthy entity whispering from up high, and I was his obedient, honest, compliant subject down below.
Time was lost to me while I was in this dreamy state, so I can’t tell you exactly how long this process went on for. After a while, the questioning stopped, however, and I began to hear words like climb, rise, and resurface being used in their place. Gradually, I had the sensation that I was being lifted higher and higher towards a different place in my mind, until I finally found the strength and control to open my eyes again.
‘You did well there, Reed. Very well. And I’ve written everything down.’ Tapping a gold fountain pen down on a pile of notes on his lap, he added, ‘And we’ve got the address.’
The trance that I was in must’ve been pretty strong, because believe it or not, I was completely unaware that I’d given Mark Mesmer an address. The address wasn’t really that important to me, though. The real reason I’d gone there to get hypnotized, I’m sure you’ll remember, was to simply improve my overall memory of the whole night. I had to continue my lie to Mark, though, so I pretended to be over the moon about having this address at my disposal.
‘Yes! We got it! Great work, Mark.’
‘My pleasure,’ he grinned.
He was just being nice here, really, because I’d agreed to pay him for his work. Pulling myself back up to a sitting position, I grabbed a wad of notes from my wallet and handed them over to him.
‘Do you need a place to stay tonight, Reed?’ he said, counting out the notes. ‘It’s getting pretty late.’
‘Err, no, I’ll be OK. Thanks, though.’
‘Well, it was good to see you again. Let’s not leave it so long next time, eh?’
‘Definitely not. We’ll go for a drink somewhere soon. I’ll give you a call.’
That’s how it went, dear reader. A few minutes later, I was back outside in the cool night air, considering what my next move might be. This isn’t entirely true, actually. I knew exactly what my next move was, but I was too scared to jump right into it.
It’s now or never, Reed. Stop being a pussy, and get on with it.
Phone in hand, I opened up a taxi app. Under destination, I typed the words: Central Police Station, Central District.
* * *
Central Police Station is a huge monstrosity of glass, concrete, and steel. Situated on a main road that cuts through the middle of Mapharno City, it has the appearance of a governmental headquarters, rather than a constabulary building. It has all these edges and sections to it, giving passersby the impression that some serious shit goes on within its walls. After the taxi dropped me off by the front steps, I felt like a vulnerable little lamb standing outside a juiced-up, mega abattoir. I was walking into the slaughter!
On the other hand, I was fairly confident that my plan was going to work. Standing outside on the steps, I accessed my memory of the night at the hotel and, now that Mark Mesmer had worked his magic on me, my recollection of the events was radically different. Whereas before I envisioned this wild, non-stop, energetic, porn star-style sex fest that went on for countless hours, with gymnastic bouncing and sweating and naked flesh undulating everywhere, I was now seeing things very differently. What I could see now in my mind’s eye was more like a series of awkward grapples and shuffling, the kind of thing that occurs between two inexperienced teenagers the first time they find themselves together in the sack. To say it was toned down would’ve been an understatement. It was the kind of sex that drunken people have down alleyways after closing time, and that was being generous.
The kind of sex that wouldn’t go viral, I thought, with satisfaction.
Lifting my head up high, and pulling my shoulders back, I walked through the main doors of Central Police Station, ready to face the music.
Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t like to promote stereotypes, but the officer sitting behind the desk at reception was a fat, lardy, doughnut-eating type. He was the kind of person that I would steam into if I saw him sitting in the audience of one of my gigs, the inevitable butt of a thousand fat jokes. There might have even been a box of iced-ring doughnuts under the counter, but I’m not totally sure. His bald dome of a head shone under the bright overhead lights, and his bagged eyes regarded me with a kind of tired, apathetic disdain.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m here to turn myself in.’
This made the fat bastard sit up straight.
‘What crime have you committed?’ he croaked.
Admittedly, this question stopped me in my tracks. What crime had I committed? What was the name for it? After a bit of fidgeting, I mumbled, ‘Breach of contract.’
‘Can I take your name, please?’
When my name popped up on the screen in front of him, there must’ve been a huge red flag next to it or something, because within minutes my possessions were taken away from me and put into sealed plastic bags, then I was thrown into a holding cell.
‘Get your head down,’ said this muscular guard, before closing the cell door. ‘Someone will be here to see you in the morning.’
Get my head down, I did, dear reader. I was pretty exhausted by this point, after all, and the cell was comfier than the derelict building.
The sound of jangling keys woke me up the next morning, and I opened my eyes to see the guard from the previous night, accompanied by this slimy-looking man in a brown suit.
‘Good morning. I’m Detective Rosenblum. I appreciate you turning yourself in like this, Mr Blagden. You’ve saved us a lot of time and money.’
‘My pleasure,’ I groaned, pulling myself upright on the foam bed.
Rosenblum looked down at me for a moment with a kind of detached compassion, the sort of demeanour you see on people playing a good cop routine. ‘Your case is quite...unusual, Mr Blagden, so I want to make things as simple as possible.’
I nodded.
‘I presume that you are willing to fully cooperate?’
I nodded again.
‘Good. Well, normally, in the case of a breached contract, you would be facing a sizeable lawsuit. However, I’ve been in contact with the CEO of the NeuroStar Corporation this morning, Mr Bill Goldschmidt, and he has made it clear that if you are willing to re-upload this deleted memory, he will drop all charges against you.’
Fuckin get in there! I thought, although I continued to wear my serious poker face. ‘I’m willing to re-upload the memory, sir. I’ll do that.’
‘Marvellous,’ beamed Rosenblum. ‘I’ll let Mr Goldschmidt know, and we’ll make arrangements post haste. In the meantime, I believe breakfast will be brought to you in around ten minutes or so.’
‘Thank you, Detective.’
Rosenblum gave a brief nod, turned on his heel, then disappeared out into the corridor.
Not a bad start, I think you’ll agree.
* * *
Hours passed, and I was still stuck in the cell. I thought they’d forgotten about me, but then someone came to deliver my lunch on a tray. I wolfed it down, even though it was tasteless. Then, shortly after that, an officer opened my cell door and escorted me down a series of corridors until we arrived in some kind of interview room. There was a desk in the corner, and some chairs lined up around the edge of the room. Rosenblum was sat on one of these chairs by the wall.
‘Take a seat, Mr Blagden. The CEO of NeuroStar will be here shortly.’
‘Thank you,’ I muttered, plonking myself down next to the detective.
There were three of us in the room: me, Rosenblum, and the officer who’d escorted me from my cell. Detective Rosenblum was sorting through some paperwork on his lap, the other officer was standing by the door trying to look authoritative, and I was sitting there feeling rather anxious and jittery. Any minute now, this Bill Goldschmidt bloke would walk through the door, and I knew that he had a reputation for being fiery. Deep in my heart, I knew that he was going to be hard to handle. He was already angry at me for deleting the video, and who knew how he was going to react when he saw the replacement video?
Heavy footsteps echoed out in the corridor.
The officer by the door stiffened up, then pulled down the handle. A few seconds later, the biggest, burliest bastard I’ve ever seen in my life walked through the door. Bill Goldschmidt was a Neanderthal in a suit, a chunky, gruff, bull of a man. He had these wide shoulders underneath his suit, a protruding gut that looked as though it was full of raw meat, and a contemptuous look on his stubbly face that made the small hairs on my arms and neck stand endwise. Sometimes, you hear people talk about love at first sight. For me, seeing Goldschmidt for the first time, it was more like fear at first sight—or repulsion.
The man was flanked by two other people, one man, and one woman, both wearing suits and holding briefcases, and they entered the room as though they owned the land that the police station was built upon.
Detective Rosenblum played it cool and formal when confronted by this, but I could tell that he was also a little intimidated by the presence of these corporate high-flyers. ‘You can use the table over there to set up the equipment,’ he said, waving a hand towards the corner.
Bill Goldschmidt turned towards one of his assistants. ‘Set up the laptop and the Neurodes,’ he grumbled, in a tone that would’ve made Barry White sound like a eunuch on helium.
While everything was being set up, Rosenblum and Goldschmidt discussed certain legalities as though I wasn’t even there. The animosity that Goldschmidt had for me was so intense, he couldn’t bear to point his acerbic eyes towards me. He’d shot a brief, demonic glance in my direction when he first entered the room, but apart from that I was simply a stain in the corner that he tried his hardest to ignore. His hatred was so great, dear reader, that it had me wondering exactly how much money he’d lost due to my video clip being deleted. I mean, that clip must’ve been generating some serious cash for him to be this pissed off. Realising this, I felt a touch of regret for not monetizing the video myself somehow. I’m not that tech-savvy, but I know that you can put adverts on your videos and earn a bit of personal profit from it. Instead, I’d done nothing and earned jack shit.
‘We’re good to go,’ said one of the suits.
Rosenblum turned towards me. ‘OK, Mr Blagden. Please sit down over there by the table.’
I did as I was told, and then the female NeuroStar employee began sticking a set of Neurodes over my head like I was a lab animal. It was all very tense and intrusive, but during the whole setup process, I was grinning inside, thinking: I’ve got an ace up my sleeve that you don’t know about.
Once everything was in place, I felt this huge blob moving across the room towards me. It was Bill Goldschmidt, and he came to a halt behind my left shoulder, reading words from a printed page that he held in his hairy fingers.
‘You are required to re-upload the missing memory to the NeuroStar Corporation’s company hard drive. Once the memory is re-uploaded and replaced, the NeuroStar Corporation retains the right to duplicate and store the resulting file in its company database for an indefinite length of time. The NeuroStar Corporation also retains the right to publish, republish, and use for any commercial purpose, the resulting file including all images and audio that it contains.’
The paper was slapped down on the desk in front of me, along with a pen.
The woman said, ‘Could you sign here, at the bottom, please?’
Taking hold of the pen, I scribbled away, almost feeling sorry for the poor bastards.
Picture the scene, dear reader. There I was, sitting there in front of this desk with loads of electrodes protruding from my head. Big, burly Bill Goldschmidt was standing behind me, looking tough and fearsome, his two employees were close-by, twiddling their thumbs, Rosenblum was sat by the wall, looking uncomfortable, and the other officer was trying his best to look stern and tough over by the door. It was at this precise moment, dear reader and valued friend, that I closed my eyes and thought back to my night of passion with the two buxom ladies.
The original video only featured the action in the hotel room, remember, so I didn’t have to replay the whole entire night in my head like I did over at Mark Mesmer’s. I cut straight to the juicy part.
This was easy to do, of course, because it was all fresh and clear in my mind. The undressing, the ogling, the fondling, the humping away. I visualized it all, in its new HD form, as the officers and executives stood around me in apprehension. Then, in due course, once every curve, every position, every grunt, and every moan had been recalled and transferred through the wires to the NeuroStar Corporation’s hard drive, I opened my eyes.
On the screen before me, the most embarrassing sex video you could imagine was playing out. Three fumbling idiots rolled around on a bed, all drunk and incoherent. The movements were sluggish, the words were slurred, and the action was mediocre at best. It was like a pissed-up wrestling match gone wrong.
A horrible silence filled the room—until Goldschmidt growled.
‘What the hell is this?’
Putting on my best “innocent, loving puppy dog” expression, I turned to him and said, ‘Sorry?’
His face was an angry red balloon that was ready to burst. ‘I said, what the hell is this?’
‘This is my memory, Mr Goldschmidt. Is something the matter?’
His broad shoulders started to shake and tremble. ‘Is something the matter? Is something the bloody matter? Yes! What the hell is this?’
Rosenblum rose from his chair. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘Yes, there is a problem!’ yelled Goldschmidt. ‘I don’t know what this tripe is, here on the screen, but it’s certainly not my video! This asshole here is playing games!’
‘I’d appreciate it if you could restrain from using language like that in this police station, Mr Goldschmidt.’
‘I’ll say whatever I want to say! This asshole over here is playing some kind of game with me!’
The officer by the door stepped closer to the CEO at this point, making his authority known. Rosenblum, for his part, looked down at me.
‘What’s going on, Mr Blagden?’
‘I have no idea, Detective. I was instructed to re-upload my memory of a certain event, and that is exactly what I did.’
‘Bullshit!’ cried Goldschmidt. ‘This isn’t your memory of the event! This is something else!’
Looking up at Rosenblum, maintaining unbroken eye contact, I said, ‘Detective, I am not lying to you. This is honestly my memory of the event that Mr Goldschmidt of the NeuroStar Corporation requested that I re-upload.’
‘Liar!’ screamed Goldschmidt. ‘You’re a goddamn liar!’
‘Detective Rosenblum,’ I said, once again wearing my puppy dog expression, ‘I would be more than willing to take a lie detector test, in order to prove what I am saying.’
I gave myself a pat on the back for this one; it was a cunning move. There was something else working in my favour, as well. I could tell that Rosenblum was unfamiliar with the original sex video, so there was no way for him to know that I was pulling a trick. All of this would’ve been enough, the tables were turning in my favour, but then, completely out of the blue, Bill Goldschmidt gave me the ultimate helping hand—quite literally.
It happened very fast, too fast for me to fully describe it to you here, but I basically felt this huge wave of muscle and meat fly my way, followed by a tightness around my neck as two strong hands choked me and cut off my air supply. The sound of boots then echoed down the corridor, and the room filled with more personnel. Officers were shouting and yelling over the top of me, trying to prise the disgruntled beast away, and then, just as my vision was becoming blurred and starry, the hairy hands of Bill Goldschmidt lost their grip on me and the CEO was wrestled to the ground.
It couldn’t have gone better.
Rosenblum held me to my word. About the lie detector test, I mean. It posed no problem for me, though, because I wasn’t actually lying. This, coupled with Bill Goldschmidt’s assault, enabled me to walk out of Mapharno City Central Police Station the very next day.
I was a free man.
* * *