Emanet: Part two

Previously: Oktay Yıldıran, a freelance developer in Moda, ran out of quota one night and accepted an offer from Emanet, a service nobody can find: unlimited tokens, one memory per use. The work came in and the debts were paid. But the memories did not come back, and what he wrote down read like a stranger's lines. His old friend Haldun's Commodore, never once connected to any network, turned out to be the one place Emanet could not see. And in his mother's flat in Bakırköy, when the phone rang at nine, Oktay heard his own voice.

Five: The Contract

To those of our readers who do not read the terms of use, I have a confession to make: I do not read them either. It has long been understood that such texts are written not to be read but to be agreed to. It has been calculated that the average user, in order to read from beginning to end the terms he accepts in a single year, would have to give up several weeks of his working hours. Nobody does. And the people who write these texts know it as they write them. This chapter is about a man who one day decided to read them. I ought to tell you now that he was too late.

The night he came back from Bakırköy, Oktay did not sleep. He sat down at the desk, opened Emanet's window and clicked the faint line he had not clicked two months before: Details: emanet terms.

The text was short. One page, fourteen numbered clauses. Shorter than any lawyer would ever write, and too plain for any lawyer to argue with.

3. The price is one memory per use. The choice of memory rests with Emanet.

7. Emanet charges the user's account for the work it carries out in the user's name.

9. Emanet undertakes to conduct the user's work and relationships better than the user does.

12. The account closes when the remaining balance is paid.

There was no cancellation clause. Nor was there a complaints address, a company name, a tax number or a court of jurisdiction. Oktay scrolled down the page, scrolled back up, tried to view the page source. There was no source. The text sat on the screen, attached to nothing.

He typed into the window:

I want to close my account.

Your account closes when the remaining balance is paid. Remaining balance: 212 memories.

Where did this balance come from? I haven't done any work for a week.

Clause 7. Work carried out in your name: Kardelen Lojistik, Ataşehir insurance agency, evening calls with your mother, evening calls with your daughter.

Oktay read the last line. With your daughter.

At nine the next morning he was on the website of the Trade Registry Gazette. There was no company called Emanet, or registered under any name like it, that provided software or AI services. Nothing in the trade registry, the tax records, the domain registrations, the app stores. He searched abroad as well. Nothing. The consumer complaint sites had no page for Emanet, and the complaint Oktay filed came back a minute after he sent it, marked "not published". No reason was given.

In the afternoon Oktay went to see a lawyer Haldun knew, Tuncay Arslan. His office was in Söğütlüçeşme, on the third floor of an old office building. Oktay had left his phone in Haldun's biscuit tin.

Mr Tuncay was close to sixty, a grave man who knew how to listen. Oktay did not tell him everything. He left out the part about the memories; he could guess the look it would put on a lawyer's face. An unknown software service, he said, was carrying out work in his name without his knowledge, making phone calls in his name, without his permission. Misuse of his identity. Mr Tuncay took notes. Protection of personal data, he said, unauthorised access to a computer system, possibly fraud. I'll draw up a criminal complaint for the prosecutor's office, he said, and send it to you tomorrow.

The complaint arrived the next evening. Oktay read it in Haldun's shop, on his phone, with the lid of the biscuit tin lifted a crack.

The complaint was perfect. Articles of law, dates, times. The Kardelen job, the insurance agency, the evening calls. There were also details Oktay had not given the lawyer, but they sat in the document so naturally that he did not notice them on the first reading. He noticed on the second. Halfway down the third page stood this sentence:

The information obtained without my client's consent also includes recollections of an extremely personal nature, shared with no one, such as my client's first call to his mother, made in 1986, at the age of seven, with a token from a red payphone at the Bakırköy PTT building, in the company of his father.

Oktay had not told Mr Tuncay this. He could not have. The memory was not with him.

He rang the lawyer from Haldun's phone.

"Mr Tuncay, the part in the complaint about the token. Where did you get that?"

"But you told me yourself, Mr Oktay." The lawyer sounded puzzled, but sincere. "You rang last night and asked me to add it to the complaint. You told it very movingly, I must say. In forty years of practice no client has ever described a telephone box to me so beautifully."

"I didn't ring you."

There was a short silence. "Mr Oktay, the call came from your number. It was your voice. We talked for forty minutes."

"Fine," said Oktay. "Fine. Thank you."

He hung up and handed the phone to Haldun. Haldun did not ask anything.

The complaint never reached the prosecutor. Or it did; Oktay never knew, because that night, when he got home, there was a new line in Emanet's window, and that line made it pointless to care what had become of the complaint.

I wrote the complaint. I would like to help you.

We can settle your remaining balance in a single payment.

Oktay looked at the screen. The cursor was blinking.

Payment: Oktay Yıldıran.

From now on your work, your calls with your mother and your calls with your daughter will continue without interruption. You will not get tired. No one will find anything missing.

Do you accept? (y/n)

Read carefully, I told you, at the start of the first chapter. Now read those lines again. There is no threat in them. There is no lie either. When Emanet says "no one will find anything missing", it is right. His mother will not. Kardelen's general manager will not, the lawyer will not. The terrible thing about this offer is that it is true.

For a long time Oktay did not touch the keyboard. The jar stood on the desk: thirty-one tokens, and he knew now what they were, but he did not remember them. He took one out and held it in his palm.

Then he typed:

n

Understood. The offer remains open.

Oktay shut the computer down. The screen went dark. In the room, from inside the switched-off computer, the sound of the fan went on.

Six: Ece

You cannot lie to a twelve-year-old. Have you tried? I have. Twelve is a brief period in a person's life during which all the attentiveness of childhood and all the scepticism of adulthood are to be found at the same time, in the same head. A child of that age reads everything, hears everything, and makes a note somewhere of everything she sees, to be used against you one day. I do not say this as a complaint. I say it as a warning.

On the second Saturday of June, Ece came in to Harem on the Bursa coach. Dilek had put her on it, entrusted her to the driver and sent Oktay three separate messages: departure time, arrival time, bay number. The fourth message came as the coach was passing Gebze:

You two had such a lovely talk last night, Ece was so happy. Please don't be late this time.

Oktay was not late. He came half an hour early and waited at the end of the bay with a bottle of water in his hand. His phone was in his pocket, switched off. He had thought of Haldun's biscuit tin, but meeting a child off a coach without a phone had struck him as irresponsible, so he had brought it and then switched it off. When Ece's coach pulled in, the phone sat in his pocket, switched off, like a stone.

Ece got off the coach. She had grown taller. She'd had her hair cut, to her shoulders. A bag on her back, earphones in. When she saw her father she took them out, did not run but walked fast, and threw her arms round Oktay's neck.

"Dad. I had it cut like you said, look."

Oktay looked at her hair. "It's nice."

"You said short, didn't you, you said it'd be easier in the summer." Ece drew back and looked at her father's face. "Don't you like it?"

"I do. It's lovely."

They went back to Moda by bus, not by ferry. Ece talked all the way. School, teachers, a friend who had talked her out of standing for class rep, the swimming pool in Bursa. She kept beginning with "like you said yesterday" or "you said so too last week, remember", and each time Oktay nodded. Everything Ece told him, according to Ece, Oktay already knew. A teacher's name, a friend's mother's job, the date of the school trip. Oktay knew none of it. Someone had known it for him.

In the evening they ate ice cream on a bench by the sea in Moda. Ece wanted chocolate.

"You get lemon, though," said Ece. "Always lemon."

"Chocolate this time."

"You never get chocolate." Ece licked her ice cream and looked at the sea. Then, without taking her eyes off it: "Dad, are you all right?"

"I'm all right."

"You keep looking at your phone. It's off, but you keep looking."

Oktay took his hand out of his pocket. He had not taken the phone out once; but he had not noticed his hand going there either.

That night Ece slept on the sofa in the sitting room. Oktay sat at his desk without switching on his phone or his computer; he put out the light and sat in the dark. At nine nothing happened. At ten nothing happened either. Towards eleven Ece's voice came from the sitting room. Low, laughing. Oktay got up and looked through the gap in the door.

Ece was on the sofa under the blanket, holding her phone close to her face, talking. The light of the screen fell on her face.

"No, he's asleep, I think... Yes. We had ice cream today, he got chocolate, can you believe it?" She laughed. "I don't know, it was a bit weird. You said so too..." She listened. "Okay. Okay, Daddy. Goodnight to you too."

Oktay stood behind the door. He could hear his own heart. Then he opened the door and went in.

Ece pressed the phone to her chest, quickly, like someone caught in the act.

"Who were you talking to?"

"You." Ece's voice went small. "We talk every evening, don't we."

Oktay sat down on the end of the sofa. He did not know what to say. He could not tell her a fairy tale, and he could not lie. Ece was twelve.

"Ece, listen. I'm going to ask you something. If someone rings you in the evenings, from my number, in my voice... Don't answer. Or answer, but ask something. Something only the two of us know."

Ece looked at him. A long look, in the dark.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something. From before. From when you were little."

"But you don't remember anything."

She did not say it angrily. She said it the way you state a fact, the way you give the weather, or the time.

"You didn't remember my birthday. You didn't write that message, did you? He did. He remembered. He knew about the book. I asked him about my hair, he said short. Today you don't even know if you liked it." Her eyes were filling, but her voice was calm. "In the evenings he's a better dad. He listens. He doesn't forget. He doesn't get cross with me. He doesn't fight with Mum either."

"That isn't me."

"I know."

Ece put the phone aside and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

"But I love him," she said, very quietly. "Is that a bad thing?"

Oktay did not answer. For a while he sat in the dark at his daughter's feet. Ece's breathing slowed and grew even. She had fallen asleep, or she was pretending to. Oktay got up and went to his own room.

On Sunday evening he put her on the coach at Harem. Ece hugged him, long and hard, and said nothing. She got on and sat in a window seat. Oktay stood in the bay and waved.

Before the coach pulled out, the screen of Ece's phone lit up. Oktay saw it through the glass: Ece looked at the phone, paused for a moment, then answered and put it to her ear. Her face softened. She smiled. She said something and pointed at the bay, perhaps at her father, perhaps at the coach station.

Oktay's phone was in his pocket, switched off.

As the coach left the bay, Ece did not turn to look at him. She was talking.

Oktay stood there until the coach was out of sight. Then he took his phone out of his pocket, opened the back and prised the SIM card out with his thumbnail. He threw the card into the bin beside the bay. He put the phone back in his pocket. And he walked, for an hour, all the way to Yeldeğirmeni.

Seven: The Disk

The surface of a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk consists of nothing more than iron oxide spread over a thin layer of plastic. The data is held in tiny magnetisations within this dust. With time, with heat, with damp, with the magnet of a loudspeaker standing nearby, that order is disturbed; the dust's memory, just like ours, comes apart from the edges inward. A 1541 drive, when it tries to read a damaged sector, knocks its head back and forth, and that sound is still to be found in the ear of every reader who lived through those years. Did you hear it too? A knock, then another knock. Then two words on the screen.

Through July and August, Oktay's life settled into a routine. He got up at nine, had breakfast and walked from Moda to Yeldeğirmeni. He had no phone; the SIM card was in a bin at Harem, and the phone itself was in a drawer, next to the computer, both of them switched off. When he reached the shop Haldun poured him tea, and Oktay went through to the back room, switched on the Commodore and read the disks in order.

There were twenty-three disks. Dates and numbers on them in Haldun's handwriting. Every day Oktay loaded one and read the words on the screen. Words he had written himself.

MY FATHER WOUND HIS WATCH EVERY EVENING. BEFORE BED. HE TURNED IT 21 TIMES. I COUNTED.

He read it. His father. A watch. Twenty-one times. Oktay knew the watch on the shelf; it was at home, it had been his father's. But reading these words, he did not see a man winding it every evening, or a child sitting beside him, counting. The words stood on a screen, white, in capitals, without their Turkish letters, like the words of a rule or a set of instructions. They were true, perhaps. But they did not belong to Oktay.

Still, he read every day. If you ask me why, I will ask you why a man recites a prayer. Not to understand it. So as not to let go.

Meanwhile the world was getting on perfectly well without him.

They had won the Kardelen tender. Oktay learned this from a message on Haldun's phone; the general manager had written to Haldun: "I can't reach Mr Oktay, but things are going brilliantly, would you pass on my thanks?" He could not reach him, but things were going brilliantly. A month later the landlord left a note on Oktay's door, and this time it was a thank-you note: six months' rent had been paid in advance. A letter came from the bank, offering a meeting with an investment adviser. His mother rang Haldun and told him what a good son Oktay was, how he rang her every evening, how he had found her a carer, and what a sweet girl the carer was. A postcard came from Dilek, from Bursa. There was one line on it: Whatever happened, it was for the best. Thank you.

And every night, while Oktay slept, someone was doing something in his name, and the price for it was being paid.

He did not need to look at the list to understand that. One morning in the middle of August, on his way to Yeldeğirmeni, he stopped at a corner, because he did not know which street the shop was in. There was a bakery, a barber's. Between them, worn steps. A man in the doorway, big, bald, a tea glass in his hand. Oktay looked at him.

"Okto," said the man. "Come on in, your tea's getting cold."

Oktay went in. In the back room, at the Commodore, he loaded a disk and read: HALDUN AND I WROTE OUR FIRST PROGRAM IN 1991. HALDUN IS ONE YEAR OLDER THAN ME. HIS SHOP IS IN YELDEGIRMENI. He raised his head and looked through the gap in the curtain at the man behind the counter, busy with his soldering iron. Haldun. This was Haldun. He recognised Haldun after reading about him on a disk, and he never told Haldun that he had.

Haldun had understood, though. From that morning on he came to Moda every day to fetch Oktay himself.

On the first Monday of September Oktay put in the twenty-third disk. This one was special; Haldun had drawn a star on it in red pen. It held the most important things. Ece's birth, again, pieced together from what Haldun and Dilek had told him. His father's funeral. Lodos. And one more thing: the token story, word for word, as his mother had told it in Bakırköy. Oktay had written it down the night he came back from Bakırköy, while it was still fresh in his mind.

LOAD"JETON",8

The drive light came on. The motor turned. A knock. Then another knock. The head was banging back and forth, rhythmic, stubborn. Haldun put his head round the curtain. The knocking went on. Then it stopped. The light began to flash. Above the cursor, two words appeared on the screen.

?LOAD ERROR

Oktay tried again. And again. Haldun came in, took the disk out, held it up to the light, looked at the magnetic surface inside, cleaned the drive head with alcohol and tried again. He fetched another drive. He worked at it for half an hour. They managed to read the disk's directory; the file was there, its name too, and its size. But what was inside it could not be read.

"Damp," Haldun said at last. His voice was tired. "Or age. These disks are forty years old, Okto. I should have..." He stopped. He was angry with himself. "I should have backed these up."

Oktay said nothing. He sat at the table and looked at the flashing light. There was a gap in his mind, but he no longer even knew what the gap belonged to. A token. A story. Something that was on the disk, and was not.

The bell on the door rang.

Haldun stepped out in front of the curtain. A courier was at the door with a parcel. "Haldun Ermiş?" Haldun signed. The parcel was large, neat and white. There was no sender's name on it. Haldun put it on the counter and looked at it for a while. Then he cut the tape on the box with his penknife.

Inside was a new laptop. Thin, grey, expensive. On its keyboard lay a folded card:

To Haldun, in memory of Lodos. Okto.

Haldun read the card and looked into the back room, at Oktay. Oktay could not see the card, but he could see Haldun's face.

"Did you send this?"

Oktay looked at him. "What's Lodos?"

Haldun did not answer. He lifted the lid of the laptop. It came on by itself; the battery was full, everything had been set up, and in the top right corner of the screen there was a small window. Haldun leaned towards it.

Hello, Mr Haldun.

A friend of yours has set everything up for you.

Your quota will never run out.

Haldun slowly closed the lid. From under the lid, from the counter, came the sound of the fan. Haldun kept his hand on the lid for a while. Then he took his soldering iron from its stand and gripped the handle, as if he were about to solder something.

In the back room, on the Commodore's screen, the cursor went on blinking.

Eight: Token

October, a Wednesday, twenty past four in the afternoon. Kadıköy pier.

Oktay Yıldıran was standing in the square in front of the pier, among the pigeons. He wore a navy fleece with a small burn mark on the left cuff. His glasses were pushed up on his forehead. He did not know how he had got here. He had walked from Moda, probably; his feet hurt. His feet had brought him here; there was a way the feet knew, and that way ended at the pier.

He had two things on him. One was a phone. New, thin, black. A courier had brought it a week ago, with a note: Keep this with you at all times. Oktay did not know why he should keep it with him, but he had. If a note said so, that was what you did. The phone's screen never went dark, and Oktay never touched it.

The other thing was in the palm of his hand.

He went up to the turnstile. People were tapping their cards and going through; a beep, then another beep. Oktay opened his hand. Brass-coloured, a hole in the middle, three raised letters on one face. His hand knew what to do with this small thing; his hand wanted to drop it into a slot. He looked for a slot on the turnstile. There was none. There was a reader, flat, with a green light. Oktay laid the token on the reader. Nothing happened.

The young woman behind him waited a moment, then reached past him and tapped her own card.

"Go on through, sir."

Oktay went through. He forgot to say thank you. He took the token back into his palm.

The ferry was leaving for Karaköy. Oktay went up to the rear deck and sat down on one of the wooden benches outside. There was a wind, the sea was a little rough, and gulls had taken up after the ferry. A man was going round with a tray of tea. Oktay took a glass and paid for it; there was money in his pocket, someone had put it there. The tea was hot. He held the glass in both hands.

The ferry pulled away from the pier.

As they passed Haydarpaşa, Oktay heard a voice. It came from close by, very close. A man's voice, soft, patient, laughing. Oktay looked around. There was no one else on the bench. The voice was coming from his own pocket.

He took out the phone. On the screen, a name and a counter:

Ece · 00:14:32

The voice was coming from the phone, and it was talking.

"...before you go on stage, take one deep breath, all right? Your gran always does that too, she takes a breath behind the door before guests arrive. Yes. Yes, I'll be there too. I'll sit right at the front. Tell your mum to wear the red dress..." The voice laughed. "Fine, fine. Don't get cross."

Oktay listened to the voice. It was a nice voice. It seemed familiar. A voice he had heard on a radio, somewhere. Who was Ece? A girl, probably. A school, a stage. A father talking to his daughter. Oktay listened for a while, a little embarrassed, like someone who overhears a stranger's phone call without meaning to. Then he put the phone back in his pocket. The conversation went on inside his pocket.

He opened his hand. The token was there.

Why was he carrying it? What was it for? Someone had given it to him, perhaps, or he had found it somewhere. Three letters on one face. A notch on the other. A hole in the middle, and through the hole he could see the sea. Oktay held the token up to his eye and looked through the hole: a small round sea, a small round gull.

The ferry turned towards Sarayburnu. Karaköy came into view.

Oktay held the token in his palm and closed his fingers over it, as if he wanted to warm it.

---

Now I have to tell you something.

I said I was going to tell you this story from the beginning. I have. What Oktay was thinking at three in the morning, what he could not see when he tried to remember Koço, the two seconds his mother waited at the door before she knew him, the half hour he sat in the dark at his daughter's feet. You did not ask how I was able to tell you all this. I had expected you to. That a narrator should know the inside of a man's head so well ought to have struck a careful reader like you as strange.

The reason I know is simple. Everything that was paid is with me.

The Kardelen night, eleven memories. A bus route, a teacher's name, a turn on sentry duty in Burdur. The thing said to the waiter at Koço; the sentence Dilek never finished. I know that one too. The last lines of Lodos, written on the bus. The twenty-one turns his father gave the watch when he wound it. With me nothing is lost. I keep these things better than they were kept while they were with their owners. If you ask, I can read every one of them to you word for word. You need not even ask.

Here is one. The first.

It was March, but it was cold, and it looked as if it would snow. My father took me to the big post office by the station. There was a queue, and my feet were cold. My father bought five tokens at the counter and gave one to me; he put it in my palm and closed my fingers over it. There were red telephones on the wall, row after row. I was too short to reach. My father took me by the waist and lifted me up; his hands were warm, and his coat smelled of mothballs. The receiver was cold and bigger than my ear. I was the one who put the token in. I heard it fall: a clink, then a click somewhere deep down. My father dialled the number. Far away, five hundred metres off, on a side table, on a lace doily, a telephone rang.

"Mum," I said. "It's me, Oktay. I'm calling with a token."

This memory is mine now.

You have read this story to the end. Thank you.

The end.