Zero History

“A sigil?”
“The sigil of forgetting.”
“That thing’s chilling the blood in your brain.”
He smiled, though she could see the loss in him, the pain of it. “It’s a very great gift.
Your man will be bricking it, if he knows we have it and he doesn’t.”
Which meant Bigend, she knew, and shit-scared. “Then he’ll want it for himself,
whatever it is.”
“Exactly,” he said, “why he mustn’t know. I’ll convince him that Pep’s stayed off the
cameras with tradecraft.”
“Pep?”
“Mad little Catalan. Perfect master car thief.” He looked at his watch, its black dial
austere. The men who guard the Queen, he’d once told her, were not allowed to wear
shoes with rubber soles, or watches with black faces. Why? she’d asked. Juju, he’d said.
“He’ll be in from Frankfurt in twenty minutes.”
“How are you assembling all this so quickly, yet finding the time to soap my back and
whatnot? Not to complain.”
“The old boy,” he said. “Can’t keep him from it. He’s doing it. It’s modular. We got that
good at it. We have our bits of business, our set pieces, our people. We got really fast.
Had to, as the best ones present themselves abruptly. Or did.”
“Can you really be invisible? Or is it more bullshit, like your rattan bones?”
“You’ll hurt Frank’s feelings. Think of it as a spell of forgetting. Or not remembering
in the first place. The system sees you, but immediately forgets.”
“What system?”
“You’ve seen a few cameras in this town? Noticed them, have you?”
“You can make them forget you?”
He propped himself on his elbow, instinctively rubbed the slick, cold surface of the
thing around his leg, then quickly wiped his palm on the embroidered coverlet. “The holy
grail of the surveillance industry is facial recognition. Of course, they say it’s not. It’s
already here, to a degree. Not operational. Larval. Can’t read you if you’re black, say, and
might mistake you for me, but the hardware and software have potentials, awaiting later
upgrade. Though what you need to understand, to understand forgetting, is that nobody’s
actually eyeballing much of what a given camera sees. They’re digital, after all. Stored
data sits there, stored. Not images, then, just ones and zeros. Something happens that
requires official scrutiny, the ones and zeros are converted to images. But”—and he
reached up to touch the edge of the bottom of the birdcage library—“say there’s been a
gentlemen’s agreement.”
“What gentlemen?”
“Your usual suspects. The industry, the government, that lucrative sector the old boy’s
so keen on, that might be either, or both.”
“And the agreement?”