Chapter 27

We spent the drive back in silence.

The old diesel engine droned monotonously under the bonnet, but the sound no longer soothed me. After the visit to the bank, the huge city of London had started to feel like a stage set to me. Not because the buildings had changed shape or the streets had gone crooked — no, the double-deckers were still hopelessly off schedule, the bike couriers still swore savagely at cab drivers. Something else had changed. My internal coordinate system.

Before, whenever I fell into another gap of forgetting, I could at least allow for the existence of some firm point to stand on. A document. A mark in a registry. A tangible memory. Now the Protocol had knocked that last foundation out from under me too. If memory can be contraband — if it can belong to someone else — then what in this life is even mine? Is this my jacket? Is this my name?

Helen asked to be dropped at her building — a small, darkened brick five-storey block in one of those quiet, half-asleep neighbourhoods tucked between Victoria and Pimlico.

"Coming up?" she asked unexpectedly, once I'd killed the engine.

Her pale face didn't have its usual mask of archival severity. Only tiredness — a dull, human tiredness.

I was surprised. In all the weeks of the investigation she had never once let me into her personal space. We met on neutral ground: cheap cafés, railway stations, damp archive basements.

"If I won't be in the way."

She smiled faintly, opening the door:

"Michael, in our situation it's already pretty hard to be in anyone's way. There's barely anything left of us as it is."

Helen's flat turned out to be exactly as I'd pictured it — spare, functional, free of domestic clutter. A small living room combined with a dining area. Dense rows of bookshelves crammed with heavy reference volumes. A few cardboard boxes with archive labels against the wall. A massive wooden table under stacks of printouts.

And an enormous, almost anomalous number of houseplants.

I automatically counted the pots on the wide windowsill. Six identical clay containers. Two of them stood empty — dead stems, cut off at the root, poking out of the dry grey soil. The other four plants were tended with pedantic care, as if someone watched over them daily, checking against a timer.

Two dead. Four alive. I didn't ask when the first two had died.

"Coffee?" came from the tiny kitchen.

"Strong, if you can."

While she fussed with the moka pot, I walked slowly around the room. No personal things. No holiday souvenirs, no postcards on the fridge, no family portraits. As if the person deliberately avoided leaving lasting traces of her own presence in this world.

Only by the sofa, on a low coffee table, stood a small wooden frame. Face down.

My eyes slid over it, but I didn't touch it. Every condemned person is entitled to their own locked safe.

"Here." Helen set a heavy ceramic mug in front of me.

I took a sip. Black, thick, scalding — with a bitter aftertaste of dark chocolate. Almost the same as the coffee the old photographer used to brew in Camden.

"Have you lived here long?" I asked, to break the silence closing in.

"Seven years."

"Do you like the area?"

She shrugged, looking somewhere through me:

"I don't know anymore. Honestly — I don't know."

It sounded too broken for a simple question about a neighbourhood.

The phone on the table spun a short arc on the polished wood. A vibration. The screen had ended up turned toward me, and I read the sender's name automatically.

Mo: "Did you eat today?"

Helen stared for a long time, without moving, at the glowing rectangle — as if it posed a physical threat. Then she picked up the phone, unlocked it. Quickly typed a few words. Stopped. Deleted them. Raised her fingers over the keyboard again, wrote something, frowned, and destroyed the text again. In the end she just locked the screen and set the phone down, having sent nothing at all.

"Sorry," she said quietly.

"Don't apologize. I understand completely."

She buried her fingers in her hair, sat silent for a minute. Then she suddenly lifted her head:

"Have you ever been to Dubai, Lawson?"

"No. Why?"

"Me neither. Never in my life."

A bitter pause.

"Funny, isn't it? A person you've never seen face to face, who doesn't exist in your tangible world — sometimes he knows more about the structure of your day than the people across the landing."

"Who is he, Helen?"

She turned the cooling mug in her fingers for a long time.

"Just a person. From the Network."

I allowed myself a faint smile:

"Speaking as a systems architect: after the phrase 'just a person,' the logs usually start showing the worst, most unsolvable software failure of all."

For the first time in days Helen laughed — short, genuine, as if frightened by her own reaction. And immediately went serious again.

"You may be right." She looked down into the dark bottom of the coffee. "He's a civil architect. Designs glass-and-concrete towers somewhere in the Emirates. We met on a half-forgotten forum almost a year ago. At first we argued about urban planning, about dead zones in architecture. Then we started talking about everything else. About life. About fears."

"And?"

"And nothing." She hesitated a little. "Sometimes I feel I know the structure of his soul better than the character of anyone I work with at the department. And then I come to my senses and remember that I've never in my life heard this man laugh for real. Not a written 'ha-ha' — an actual voice. I don't know how he walks. How he goes quiet when he's angry. The internet is a terrifying thing, Michael. It's far too brilliant at filling people in inside our heads, plugging the emptiness with perfect illusions."

I said nothing. I had nothing to argue with. For all these past weeks I had been doing exactly the same thing — trying to reconstruct the image of a man out of digital scraps, old logs, and other people's receipts. And every time, instead of a living Michael Lawson, I got a cold, flawless simulation.

When I had already stood up to leave, my eyes caught again, involuntarily, on the wooden frame by the sofa.

Helen registered the movement. Silently she went over to the table, slowly turned the frame over, and looked at the photo for a few seconds. Then she held it out to me.

In the photograph was a young, laughing woman of about twenty-five. A light summer dress. In her arms — a huge, ridiculous bouquet of sunflowers. Sunlight flooded the frame. To her right stood a man — jeans, a light jacket.

His face wasn't there. The right edge of the photo had been cut off. Brutally, but frighteningly straight — with a utility knife, almost along a ruler.

"Your sister?" I asked.

"No."

"A friend?"

Helen slowly shook her head:

"It's me, Michael. The photo was taken six years ago in Kent."

I moved my gaze from the photograph to her. The same line of the jaw. The same shape of the eyes. But in the eyes in the photo there was something the present Helen no longer had — a lightness you can't act.

"And the man beside you?"

She was silent for so long that outside the window a scheduled bus had time to pull in and drive away.

"I don't know," she answered at last. Calmly. Without a shadow of performance.

"What do you mean, you don't know? It's your own photograph, Helen."

"In the most literal sense. I remember sitting at this table with a utility knife and cutting off the right part of the frame with my own hands. I did it deliberately. But I absolutely do not remember who was standing there. What colour his hair was. What his name was. It's all gone."

We stood facing each other in the half-dark of the flat, and a thought struck me that was absurd in its simplicity.

Until today I had selfishly assumed this whole nightmare was happening only to me. That it was my life the Protocol was methodically tearing pages out of. But now I could see that someone had already cut an enormous piece out of the living flesh of Helen's life with the very same sterile shears. By the same algorithm. With identical neatness.

22:15

Late that evening, back in the empty flat, I walked on autopilot to the desk and put on the headset.

Over the past weeks this little plastic device had become as obligatory an attribute as a wristwatch or a set of keys. I no longer thought about why I put it on. I just put it on — and it eased a little.

I dropped my head back onto the leather headrest of the chair. For a few seconds a dense, dead silence filled the earpiece. Then, somewhere near my right temple, a relay clicked, barely audible.

"Michael?" Clara's voice came through full and soft, without a single electronic flatness. "This is the longest you've stayed silent in one day. The logs record no queries for almost three hours."

"Is that a critical error?"

A tiny pause — barely noticeable, as if she were gathering her thoughts.

"I don't know. But usually you fall into that kind of silence exactly when you're getting close to some right question."

I closed my eyes. The arm of the headset pressed lightly on the bone behind my ear.

"Clara... What if I'm no longer sure it's really me asking all these questions? What if someone else is speaking inside me?"

Silence.

A long one. Far longer than the standard wait time. So drawn out that I'd already decided the signal had dropped, that the micro-battery in the arm had died.

Then Clara said — very quietly, stripping her voice of its usual lightness:

"In that case, Michael... maybe it's finally time to stop looking for the one who remembers all this. And to try to find the one who, at some point, consciously decided to forget it."

There was a dry crack in my ear. The connection cut out.

I slowly took off the headset and set it on the desk. I sat in the dark until my eyes adjusted.

And only then did I understand what was bothering me.

For the first time in all our daily conversations, Clara hadn't made a joke at the end. Hadn't smoothed the edges with a routine barb. Hadn't said her usual: "Talk soon, Lawson."

As if my question hadn't been provided for in her software architecture.

Or as if the answer to it lay far beyond what she was permitted to tell me.