Blonde Bombshell Read Online Free PDF Page B

Maybe I should think about that.
    Instead she thought about children’s parties. About compulsory fun games imposed by well-meaning grown-ups, about party food, about standing next to the food on account of being too shy to join in; about water-pistols and unwanted presents and the fat boy in the class who had to be invited so as not to cause offence; about the incredible incongruity of evil tough girls in party dresses; about birthday cake.
    It must be my birthday, she’d thought just now, and someone’s finally figured out what to give to the girl who’s got everything. She asked herself, When is my birthday?
    She didn’t know.
    The hell with that, she thought, and accessed SparkPlug on her Warthog. She tapped in “Lucy Pavlov”.
    Lucy Pavlov. Born 13 January 1990, Novosibirsk, Siberia.
    Ah yes, she said to herself. The 13th of January. A Friday, naturally.
    She scrolled down through all the stuff she’d done. There was a lot of it. Then she came to the bit she was looking for.
    Parents: Pavel & Janine Pavlov, itinerant Street entertainers; died 1994 in a traffic accident.
    When I was four, she figured out. Well, that’d explain why I don’t remember them.
    Education:  various. Attended Novosibirsk University 2010-11, majored in computer science, physics, mechanical engineering and theory of ethical catering. Postgraduate research in superconductors and digital linguistics. Founded PaySoft Industries in 2012.
    Oh, she thought.
    She could remember founding the company; at least, she could remember giving an interview in which she’d told the world how she’d come to found the company, the challenges she’d faced, the support she’d had from sundry people whose names temporarily escaped her. She could remember it word for word, apart from the missing names. And after that — 17 March 2015 — she had virtually perfect recall: every meeting, every drinks party, every conversation in an elevator, every broken pencil and spilt coffee, the taste of every sandwich she’d ever eaten. That was normal. She’d always prided herself on her memory (something else to be grateful for). Funny, though, that it should start so abruptly, so arbitrarily— And unicorns. Or enemies. Both species seemed equally improbable. She tried to remember a single occasion on which somebody hadn’t liked her. No, nothing.
    The helicopter came to rest, gently as a hummingbird hovering over an open blossom. She waited for the blades to calm down, and nipped briskly out of the door.
    Once she got there, of course, she enjoyed the launch party. She always enjoyed parties once she’d got over her initial reluctance. She chatted with the President, the various ambassadors, the CEOs and the technical journalists, the professors and the marketing people and the image people. While she talked, she thought: SparkPlug knows when I was born, and SparkPlug’s just a page in a book that people write stuff on. So people know when I was born and what I did at university and who my parents were; and how would they know that unless I’d told them? Therefore, I must have known. And if I’d known but don’t know now, I must have forgotten.
    Heavens, she thought. An enemy, memory loss and unicorns. Quite a day.
    Someone introduced her to someone who turned out to be a doctor; not a doctor of this or a doctor of that, but a making-people-better doctor. There now, she thought, that’s handy.
    “Talking of which,” she said (they’d been discussing Herbert Hoover and the first Great Depression), “what does it mean if you start forgetting stuff?”
    The doctor, a pleasant-faced, middle-aged Finn, frowned slightly. “There’s a lot of things it could be,” she said. “Amnesia, incipient dementia, mercury poisoning, exposure to high levels of epsilon radiation. Or it could just mean you’ve been married for longer than eighteen months. What seems to be the problem?”
    Oh, it’s not me, Lucy was about to say. But what the hell. “I can remember