Author: Mark Renney
Tanner was a loner. Even prior to the System, during his childhood and throughout adolescence, he hadn’t managed to form any long-term relationships. He had kept his head down, listened intently, and worked hard and he had been an above average student and yet none of his teachers had seemed impressed nor even to notice. When the System came a-calling he had known instantly just what he could do for them, what he could become.
He hadn’t ever felt resentful or blamed his choice of occupation for the solitary life he had led. In fact, he believed they were complementary, that he had been more efficient because of it. In the past, whenever an Eraser was around, people had been worried, close mouthed and reluctant to share or shoot the breeze. Tanner was unsure if this was still the case but he suspected it wasn’t. He still had the same effect and, when those who didn’t work for the System realised he was about, in the proximity as it were, their conversations would stutter to a halt.
Tanner’s colleagues, on the other hand, talked almost constantly and they didn’t care if he was around and could hear or if he was excluded. Their lives seemed to consist of an endless cycle of family feuds, of birthday parties or barbecues and excursions.
As Tanner listened to them, to the other Erasers, he was often struck by just how similar their lives were to those of his suspects. The ones he had unearthed and exposed, the lives he had cut and wrenched from their moorings that he, and they, had erased.
Tanner had often been responsible for the erasure of people he had known. This was against the rules. He was all too aware that cases where the person was known to the Eraser should be passed across to another worker and yet Tanner had ignored this time and again. Over the years he had worked hard at convincing himself it didn’t matter, that it was a small rebellion, just a little thing, but of course he had left a trail.
There had been colleagues from his schooldays, boys and girls he had sat alongside in various classrooms. Occasionally one of his teachers had appeared on the list. Tanner recognised their names immediately and had been able to conjure up the particular individual with his mind’s eye. The pictures had always been and remained vivid and detailed whilst Tanner’s recollections of his so-called class ‘mates’ were hazy.
Tanner had often found himself brooding on this, on the fact that he could remember his former educators but had forgotten his contemporaries. He wondered if this meant that he regretted the removal of certain lapsed citizens, more so than others.
Ultimately though it didn’t matter. It wasn’t Tanner’s job to make sense of it, to understand the how and the why. No, it was his job to wipe all of them from the records and from the system.