Chapter 43

We came back to the underground office after noon.

Helen was silent the whole way. After the notification on the embankment she moved more slowly and calmly than before — with that frightening sluggishness that sometimes comes over people right after a terminal diagnosis. When the first panic has already burned out, but the mind's ability to accept what's happening hasn't yet switched on.

Harris sat in the same spot, in the same corner, in the same hunched posture. It seemed that in all the time we'd been away he hadn't moved a centimetre.

When our footsteps carried across the concrete, he slowly raised his head. His faded eyes focused not on me — on Helen's face.

"Has it started?" he asked quietly. "The cleanup phase?"

Helen nodded submissively.

"Yes."

He slowly closed his eyes and exhaled convulsively. He wasn't surprised. He didn't ask technical questions. He only said into the emptiness of the room — very quietly, in a cracked voice:

"Forgive me, girl. Forgive me."

She said nothing in reply. Because she understood: this broken old man was now asking forgiveness not for his personal mistakes. He was asking forgiveness for the whole of this world that they had once so carelessly helped to construct.

I sat down opposite Harris.

On the dusty table between us the black dictaphone still lay, with its stilled cassette. But now it no longer seemed the main object in this room to me. The main and most frightening thing was the man across from me.

For a long time I studied his deeply lined face.

"Thomas. Why didn't you come up to me all this time on the street? Just speak to me directly, instead of all this?"

Harris lowered his gaze to his old, wasted hands. For a long time he examined his knotted fingers, as if trying to remember who exactly they belonged to.

"I did come up, Michael," he said dully. "I honestly tried."

"When? Where?"

"Several times."

He spoke unbearably slowly. Every word had to be dragged out with effort — from some very deep, viscous darkness.

"The first time — last autumn. The Thames embankment. You were sitting alone on a bench, reading a newspaper, drinking coffee from a paper cup. I recognized you from a distance. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest. I went to cut you off — decisively, quickly. There were literally three steps left." He paused. "And then I suddenly stopped short. Because I had completely forgotten why I was walking over. And who you were."

I didn't say a word. That everyday confession somehow seemed more frightening than any revelations about the Protocol.

"The second time — in an Underground carriage. About four months ago. You were standing by the doors, talking on the phone. I raised my hand to touch your shoulder." The old man reproduced that short, unfinished movement in the air. "But that same second my brain refused to remember your name. I was frightened by that emptiness. And I got off at the next station."

I looked at him and felt the whole old house of cards inside me collapsing.

All these weeks I had been sure that in front of me was a great conspirator, calculatingly leading me to the truth. But the reality turned out to be more cynical. On the chair before me sat a gravely ill man who, every day, was losing control of his own memory piece by piece, all over again. And who kept coming. And kept trying. Again and again.

"And what about the notes in the hiding places?" I asked quietly.

"Those were much easier to write." He gave a barely perceptible nod. "The process of fixing things on paper holds on to what's left of the structure. As long as the pencil is moving across the sheet — I still remember who exactly I'm writing to. The moment I put it down — it all falls apart."

A long pause.

Then I took the folded slip of paper out of my pocket and laid it on the table between us.

"Now ask Harris about Anna."

Harris looked at the small white scrap for a long time, without looking away. Then he raised a clouded, endlessly sad gaze to me and asked unexpectedly:

"Tell me honestly, Michael. Did you love her?"

I was thrown:

"I... I don't know. I don't remember."

"Exactly." He smiled bitterly, sympathetically. "The code erased the feeling and left only the dry fact."

He carefully picked up the note with two fingers. He turned it slightly in the light — as if seeing this text for the first time in his life.

"She came into your life after you'd already grasped the first phase of the catastrophe. After you understood that your memory could no longer be trusted." He put the note back on the table. "Anna never had any connection to our work. You met completely by chance, in the pouring rain outside a bookshop. And then, for the first time in many years, you remembered that you were a human being, not a computational function."

I listened in silence, not daring to interrupt.

"Under her influence you started to change. You began leaving here for home at six sharp, like a normal person. You started switching off your phone at weekends, which was never like you before. You even..." Harris chuckled quietly, warmly, at the memory, "you even tried to learn to cook dinners for her. It came out dreadful. Everything kept burning. But you tried very hard."

Unexpectedly to myself, I smiled — involuntarily, on pure reflex. As if somewhere in the most hidden, blocked corners of my subconscious that absurd domestic picture had for a moment seemed vaguely familiar.

"And then the Protocol came into its final stretch," Harris's face darkened. "Work started devouring all your time again. At first Anna waited for you patiently at night. Then she began asking what was going on. Then she simply stopped asking."

"Did we split up because of that?" I asked quickly.

Harris shook his head:

"No."

"Did she fall under the system's cleanup?"

"No."

I sat up straight:

"Then what happened to her, Thomas?"

He was silent so long that I was already afraid of another bout of amnesia. But then he said very quietly:

"You erased her yourself, Michael."

The underground room went completely silent. Only the old fuse box in the corner hummed faintly.

"How could I have erased her?" I finally asked.

"Not deliberately. Not with a direct keystroke." Harris sighed wearily. "You erased her from your life simply because you made the decision to erase yourself completely. You removed the key node from the network — and the whole structure collapsed."

I felt my heart skip a heavy, painful beat.

"She came here about a week after your 'hospitalization,'" Thomas went on, staring at the wall. "She stood at the door and cried. She kept asking: 'Thomas, I beg you, tell me where Michael is now. What have they done to him?' And I answered that I didn't know. That was the pure truth. Because the man she loved no longer physically existed on this planet. In his place a stranger with your face was already walking the streets."

Harris covered his face with his palms for a moment.

"She came a few more times. She tried to find you at the hospitals, kept watch outside your new house. But you looked at her on the street as at a completely unfamiliar woman. Apologized politely and walked past. In the end she just gave up."

"Where is she now, Thomas?"

The old man slowly, helplessly shook his head:

"I don't know, Michael. I don't know anymore."

I sat and looked at him.

And in that minute a crushing truth landed on me. All these weeks I had considered my own amnesia the main tragedy. But my memory belonged only to me — it was a selfish loss. Anna, though, had one day lost a living person. A person who kept walking the streets of London, breathing, talking, buying newspapers — but who, for her, was no longer alive. It was an execution carried out on the living. For her, not for me.

Harris suddenly fumbled into the inner pocket of his coat. For a long time he searched for something with trembling fingers. At last he pulled out an old leather wallet, snapped the clasp. From a hidden compartment a photograph fell onto the table, folded in four, yellowed at the edges.

He smoothed it out very carefully, as if afraid of damaging it, and pushed it toward me.

"She left this on her last visit. Specifically for the day you'd finally come back to this room."

I took the photo with a trembling hand.

There were two people in the photograph. Me — five years younger, with a living, unworn face. And a young, beautiful woman with dark hair tousled by the wind. We were sitting with our arms around each other on the stone steps of a small street café. She was laughing loudly, looking straight into the lens. And in the photo I wasn't looking at the camera.

I was looking only at her.

With such boundless, adoring tenderness that I couldn't even imagine it now.

I turned the photo over. On the back was an unfamiliar, neat, rounded hand — one line:

"I really hope, Michael, that one day you'll become yourself again after all. Even if by that day you'll never be able to remember me."

I closed my eyes.

And for the first time in this whole long, exhausting investigation I felt inside me not fear, not an investigator's fury, and not a maniacal desire to dig down to the truth.

I felt pure, enormous, unbearable human grief.

I sat in that dead underground bunker and, for the first time in my life, mourned that stranger I had once been. And whom now, however hard I tried, I would never be able to bring back.