VERSE ONETHE BOOK OF THE DEAD
“We are sparks. Our experiences, our memories, are electro-chemical impulses dancing from neuron to neuron, across the synaptic divide. These impulses may be mapped and influenced, written and sung out in epics. We are stories.”
—Aset, Philosophies of Memory and Laws of Applied Sahusynics, First Edition
* * *
Our story’s not so much an epic—I had him and I lost him.
Was he ever really there? Or was he a ghost?
And how well can you really know someone, anyway?
The Memory Options Specialist doesn’t give a crap about my questions, and stories, and blubbering about how I just saw him, and now. And now. I get it, the waiting room’s full of grief bags like me.
She hands me a tablet. The bright screen stabs my rusty eyes.
“Look over the levels,” she says. “We’re here to help with any editing-related questions you might have.”
Happiness is a Choice™.
ONEFIELD OF REEDS
The staff gave me a picture of me and someone I’m supposed to remember. Every morning, I’m supposed to look at the picture as soon as I wake up, then close my eyes and feel for the memories. I’m supposed to imagine that my shredded brain is like a tree. If you hack a tree down to the stump, new shoots will grow, the Head Therapist told me on my first day here. He called it “coppicing” and blabbed about nature’s ability to heal.
Mostly I just need to pee.
I don’t remember the guy in the picture frame on the worn wooden desk in my room with its creaky floors in this weird old house. I don’t even remember how I got here. Curving lines shaved into one side of his buzzed head, another slashed line in one eyebrow. Bright, gold-ringed brown eyes crinkle at the corners from his smile. A tropical-print shirt unbuttoned to show his brown chest and gold chain. One hand holding a glass of white wine, the other arm draped across the shoulders of a guy with windblown hair, dark eyes, and a sharp nose. White linen shirt against brown skin, the sloppy smile of someone a few glasses of wine in. This guy in white is supposed to be me, and the other is supposed to be my husband. We’re on a rooftop overlooking the golden lights of a city at sunset, though hold a gun to my head and I couldn’t tell you where.
This will all come back in time, the therapists tell me. Close your eyes. Breathe deep. Picture the new shoots of your memories bursting up toward the sun, and when you step back there’s a you-shaped topiary in a garden of paradise, and you’ll remember everything.
I’ve got no idea how I remember words like “topiary” but not my husband. None of the therapists here can give a straight answer why, just stuff like you’ve been through trauma and your memories will heal in time. And have you tried journaling about this?
No topiary this morning. Instead, I make my bed in my room like we’re supposed to. The clock by my bed tells me it’s just past eight in angry, red numbers. We only have clocks in our rooms—the gongs keep us on schedule in the manor and over the grounds. I came here with nothing, apparently. There’s only the wardrobe filled with dumpy gray sweat suits, with my name—Fox—embroidered over the heart in blue letters, an empty writing desk, and a chest of drawers filled with socks and underwear. I wriggle into one of the sweat suits, then take a leak in the bathroom down the hall that I share with three other residents, and brush my teeth.
In the mirror over the sink, I look like the me in the picture, just a little pudgier and with more lines around the mouth. I don’t feel old, though my face says, you’re here to pick up the kids for the carpool, Dad.
The therapists get on me about my morning mirror affirmations. Have you been practicing? Have you been really feeling them? “How about you tell me?” I tossed at Flo, the Facilities Manager and my favorite staff member here, during yesterday’s intro session. You already told me about a husband I don’t know, and a life I don’t remember, so you must know if I’m the kind of person to pep-talk himself.
“You want to question everything, and that’s great,” Flo said in her kindergarten-teacher voice with her poufy blonde hair, gentle blue eyes behind glasses, and a pink cardigan over her lavender scrubs. She’s the
one who rings the gong, keeping us in time, while dipping into her cardigan pockets for strawberry candies. “You’re getting to know yourself again. And that self is suspicious and sarcastic at times. A wonderful discovery!” Instead of getting mad, she leaned forward, the keys on the lanyard around her neck bouncing against her chest. “Bend into that. Bend into the questions. Question the questions. That’s why you’re here.”
Sure, Flo. I’ll go with the flow.
Talking to myself in the mirror is about as batshit as the other stuff the therapists have us do—the meditations, and the singing crystal bowl sessions, and the trust-falls—so, what the hell. Deep breath.
“Your name is Fox,” I say, still surprised every time the stranger’s lips move in the mirror. “You will remember. You are special, and you are loved. And you deserve to remember.”
* * *
Down the short hallway and the wooden staircase, I join the line of people in gray sweat suits waiting on the faded floral carpet outside the sunroom. The woman with blue-streaked hair at the back of the line turns and nods a hi to me. Her name’s Minou—it’s embroidered over her heart just like mine—and I know from yesterday’s group session that she remembers when she was growing up she had a cat named Sprinkles. When she was done sharing her new memory, Seth, the Head Therapist, thanked her and nodded to us. Which was our cue to tell Minou in one voice, we are memories, and memories are we.
People dump their memories all over each other here. Fredericka, who pops up behind me in line, doesn’t let me even fire off a good morning before she says she won first place in shot put at a track meet when she was fourteen. Up ahead, Pierluigi’s talking about how bright the sky was over his childhood home on the Ligurian Sea. We all came here in varying degrees of head-fuck, so Seth says it’s important to share happy memories when they come back to us. He calls it Radical Remembrance.
“I honor your memory,” I say to Fredericka, still feeling dumb about the line that
Seth says we’re supposed to say back. She nods a thank-you.
Seth and the therapists in their different-colored scrubs are big on scripted lines. And hippy-dippy therapy concepts like Radical Remembrance, and Memory Mapping, and Moving Meditation. And, I guess, alliteration.
The glass door to the sunroom opens and the line moves. My eyes fall to the carpet, willing memories to bloom in my head like the worn pink roses. We’re supposed to spend our morning focusing on the things we remember, as prep for our Memory Mapping sessions. Or, in my case, the things the therapists tell me I’ll remember.
My name is Fox.
I’m a memory editor. One of the best, so they say.
There was an attack on New Thebes. A bomb exploded in the city center and a weird signal torched the memories of everyone in the blast radius.
I survived the attack—barely, if you can count having basically zero memory as surviving—but my husband, Gabe, didn’t. Too close to the bomb and his memories turned to dust.
So I checked myself into the Field of Reeds Center for Memory Recovery, apparently. For the staff to try to recover my damaged memory code. And to find a way to bring Gabe back.
I wrack my brain for any trace of those memories and come up empty. There’s stuff I remember, of course. I’m not one of the residents with the yellow bracelets who the therapists have to hover around. Who remember so little that, according to Flo, they’re a danger to themselves. My first solo session with Seth, he talked about core memory. How Alzheimer’s patients, before the cures, usually lost their recent memories first, leaving the older, deeper memories intact. He said it’s how I know how to walk and talk, and how things in the Center—in some woodsy part in the Western Massachusetts district of Kemet—are familiar. I remember being a kid and living for a while in New Thebes, my parents installing the little silver nub of the memory transmission node behind my left ear. I even remember starting work at NIL/E Technologies, the giant company behind memory and resurrection—rez for short—tech who runs this place, if I squint hard enough. You say NIL/E like the end of the word “denial,” I remember. And then a big anchor wraps around my neck with how I can remember the name of the place I worked but not my own husband.
I’m a dotted-line drawing of myself, hoping to remember enough to fill everything in.
I bury my hands in my pockets and dig into my thigh with my fingernails, just to yank me back to my body. I breathe past the anger, like Flo tells me. I’m supposed to be a reed swaying in the breeze when the anger hits, giving in and letting it blow past me.
I hold my breath until my lungs burn. Telling myself to give it time.
Gabe. The name tastes bright green, like the herbs from the garden where we pluck off dead leaves, and snip chives, and plant things as part of our therapy. We poke holes into the warm earth with our fingers, drop seeds inside, and cover the holes with dirt. Whispering grow, grow as much to the seeds as to our memories. His name feels like the grass on the big lawn, too. I asked Flo how in the hell I can feel a name and she shrugged and told me, hon, your brain is so shredded we’re just happy you’re not pissing yourself.
Then she went pale and asked me not to tell Seth she said that.
I stuck that one in my back pocket, just in case.
The line moves again and soon I’m the one waiting at the door with its glass panes covered with white fabric. When the door opens, J calls for me to come on in and my slippered feet sink into another floral carpet. In the sunroom, three stiff-backed chairs circle a low coffee table that’s dotted with crystal knickknacks and fancy china for morning tea. Misty painted landscapes on the walls are windows to somewhere else. Another set of glass double doors leads outside to a small brick courtyard, painted gold by the morning sun. The only thing that feels out of place is the steel reclining chair, mantis-like with how it’s leaned back, waiting to strike.
Another whoops-your-memory-is-mangled plothole: I asked Seth two days ago when I first got here and saw that chair how I could remember mantises but not my own name until the therapists reminded me, and he hit me with one of his easy smiles. Memory isn’t linear, he said. The wave knows it’s a part of the ocean.
Which is just about the politest way to tell me to shut up and stop asking so many questions.
J spins the chair and makes a show of dusting off the seat, giving me a short bow and hand-wave like, at your service. Like I’m here for a haircut and not a brain scan.
At least J tries.
“Mornin’,” they say, as sunny as their yellow scrubs.
“Looks like someone had their coffee.” I try out a smile and sink into the metal chair. I overheard one of the therapists yakking this to another one yesterday and thought I’d give it a go. “Did I say that right?”
J beams. “Bingo! Classic work-appropriate jokey-ness. A-plus.”
The sides of the metal chair squeeze a little. I push against the arms that are still warm from the last person in here for their scan. My third morning here, and my third time in this chair, I’ve learned not
to jump when the clear visor from the headrest snaps over my face. Pink and purple lights dance across the visor, in time with the faint, high-pitched beeps blurring in my ears.
“The whole of your memory is your memorystream,” J says softly, somewhere behind me. “Watch it flow like a river. Unbroken and eternal, and reaching for the sea.”
J’s the only staff member besides Flo I’ve met so far who makes the scripted lines they all bust out—trust your emotions, healing takes time, the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm—sound like a prayer. At least starting the day by hanging out with J is starting to feel familiar. Comforting, almost, with their warm eyes, their straight-backed stocky body zipping around the sunroom, their bleached and cropped hair looking like someone dipped them upside down in butter.
And then we wait. More beeps, more lights darting like bees over my eyes. J unscrolls the digital screen of their Reeder by tapping the tube and flicking up their hand, and the display crackles to life. I remember carrying around my own identical device—a gold-capped crystal pipe that’s about the length and width of my forearm, with recessed keys and a digital screen—back at work, like all the therapists here. Maybe remember? From the digital display, a projection of thin branches bursts into the air between us. The spindly gray arms look made of ice, and so delicate that they’d snap if I touched them. A memorystream is supposed to look like a river with little creeks that branch off and rejoin the whole, they tell me, but mine looks like someone yanked the plug and sent just about all of the stream down the drain.
I try not to sink. Try. The visor snaps back into the chair’s headrest. J sidles up to me and tips their head at the projection.
“Anything?” I ask.
“Looks like we’ve got some slight budding here.” They raise their hands in the air and swipe, zooming in to one corner of the projection where a little nub looks the same to me as it did my first morning. “Maybe.”
I don’t know if the lie is okay if it’s meant to give me hope.
“Have you been doing your affirmations?” J asks.
“Ugh, yes.”
J playfully conks me on the shoulder with their Reeder.
“I don’t sense boundless gratitude at the wonders of creation in that ‘ugh,’ mister,” they say.
“Guilty. I’ll do better.”
Here is where I’m supposed to bounce out of this chair and give in to the process with a big smile slapped on my face, thankful—like Flo said
said—that I’m not pissing myself. But then the mystery of the picture of me and Gabe in my bedroom drags me down. I can hear Flo telling me to be like a reed bending in the wind.
I must’ve been bendier ten years ago. There’s white in my hair, now, and I can’t touch my toes. Doubt locks up the backs of my legs.
“How will I ever get my memories back?”
When I catch J’s eyes, their lips press together. “Memories are like scars,” they say, hugging their Reeder close. “Way down, in your neurons. In the deepest part of you. Nothing is ever really gone. It just takes time to get back.”
I really want to believe them. Seth says things like happiness is a choice, so at least for today I’ll choose to trust that I’m not going to be a dotted-line drawing of myself forever.
“I’ll wait, I guess.” I fumble out of the chair and head to the courtyard door.
“Let’s add another affirmation for you,” J calls. “‘I will be kind to myself. And let the process…’” They stare at me with searching eyes. “‘Process.’”
Out in the courtyard, I wince against the sunlight.
TWOFLASHES
Idon’t remember loving Gabe, but I remember losing him. Snippets of memories come at me in flashes like someone sliding shards of glass into my head. I wake up in the middle of the night in sweaty, twisted sheets. Flo says it’s because trauma really digs into the memorystream and hangs on tight.
I remember standing by a window in an apartment that must’ve been mine, looking out at a city. The closest buildings crowded like a row of teeth, connected by metal catwalks, with twinkling lights on fire escapes. Narrow streets that gave way to a wide-open city square of pink granite ringed by squat glass buildings and stone towers. A long rectangular pool in the middle of the square reflected the night sky, ending at a wide stairway that led to a white pyramid with a base as big as a city block. The pyramid rose a few hundred feet higher than the surrounding buildings, like a diamond against the night, capped by a digital screen. Blue lights trickled down the pyramid edges.
Some joking pros-and-cons list we made before moving into this place floated to me. Pro: Three blocks from all the action of the city square. Con: When you walk to the kitchen in your underwear at midnight for a glass of water, your office is staring at you.
Flash. Everything white.
The pyramid exploded. Weird, I had time to think, before the rolling white cloud, the roundhouse from a pissed-off god, launched me off my feet. I woke up on the floor, covered in broken glass, a high whine blasting through my head.
Red and blue flashes in the streets. Sirens and screams.
Skittering over broken glass. My phone flashing in my hands. Calling him, again and again, no answer. Just the eeeeeeee in my ears, drowning everything out. Blood in my eyes. Blood in my mouth.
Running through the streets and the crush of bodies, none of us knowing where we’re running. To the smoking crater that was once the city square, or away from it?
Grabbing the shoulders of the people I slam into. All of us caked with dirt and blood, wild-eyed. Have you seen him? Have you seen him?
Flash.
A news crawl on the screen in a gray waiting room. Not sure how I got there. Where there is. Memory virus. Neuro-terrorists. One anchor talks while the other beside her cries quietly. The weapon exploited the memory backup transmissions, using the company’s own technology against them. Customers’ memory backups were destroyed, even within the secure NIL/E servers, files replaced with some kind of scrambled code. And more as this story develops. The anchors don’t say final-death—because even in the decades since rez tech, those words are a night terror—but what else is it if your memory backup is scorched? Instead, they sniffle. Hug your loved ones tight, and…
Flash.
I’m in a training room and someone at the front is telling us something we all already know, that our parents told us when they had our nodes installed
when we were kids.
The wireless memory transmissions are painless. Your memories are relayed to our servers every twelve hours, where they will be kept safe in case of critical damage to your vessel and/or node.
I’m running in the street again, dodging rubble. Cars on fire. Blurs that I can’t look at, because I know if I stop and look, I’ll see an arm. A leg. I hear voices in my head that aren’t mine. Or maybe it’s the leaked security comms recording that the news plays over and over again. Who knows. Time and memories blur all into each other.
—halt all transmissions until we can stabilize. Are you seeing this? Isolate the memorystreams of everyone at the square. Put them in quarantine. Priority one is keeping our servers safe. Those fuckers. Those fuckers think they can get us. We invented this tech. This is our codedamned house—
My hearing is cranked up way too high in this sad, gray room. The overhead lights buzz like a jet engine. Someone is screaming. Edit to add: I’m that someone, screaming. A folding chair is in my hands and I throw it at one of the walls. Because they promised. They fucking promised that none of us would ever die. That none of us would have to say goodbye. And I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Gabe, and our separation was temporary—temporary until we could cool off—and now they’re telling me he’s gone.
I know the woman with the tired face and the steady eyes doesn’t deserve this, but neither do I. So she gets the screams and the tears and the begging. And the don’t you know who the fuck I am? I don’t know if I’m asking this or telling her.
Someone behind me jabs something sharp into my neck.
Flash.
In one of the folding chairs again in the sad, gray room. Night, this time. The tired woman is speaking but her words don’t match the movement of her lips. She’s being nicer than I deserve, than she has time for, with all the others in the waiting room outside.
We can offer you an envesseled approximation of your loved one while you wait for memory cleansing. Approximation. A husband skimmed from your memories—traits, habits, behavior—cobbled together. More you than him. Temporary. Hopefully. Though this virus is craftier than we first thought.
Or we can delete him. Your choice.
We are doing all we can. Terrible, yes, those monsters. No, they didn’t suffer. The blast was—take your time. Look over our new memory-editing levels for your Upgrade. Staff discount. We recommend the Euphoria Special.
THREETHERAPIES
Seth looks like he’s on a beach vacation, in linen pants and a long-sleeved white shirt bright against his skin, not leading group therapy. Me and the three others in my group—Cohort, I’m told, because this place is jazzed over vocabulary—sit on folding chairs in a circle on the lawn in front of the brick patio, the bright morning sunlight blanketing down on us. Minou, Stash with the purple-dyed mustache, Chengmei with her laughing eyes and frizzy gray hair. There are fifty residents here, about half as many staff, and we all usually stick with our Cohort as we move through different therapies. To really foster trust, according to Seth. The sun glances off his shaved head at the opposite side of the circle from me. Behind him, birds glide over the marsh. The warm breeze smells like water and dirt.
The first morning I met him, after my tour of the manor, Seth told me he wasn’t just the Center’s Head Therapist, but also my Case Manager. Though he hoped I’d think of him as a friend. I’d managed to not immediately roll my eyes at him. The first thing I discovered about myself when I woke up here was Fox has zero appetite for bullshit. Maybe I should try that as an affirmation.
We start therapy sessions with a pop quiz. My third pop quiz this morning, since a solo breakfast in the dining room with its round tables, dead fireplace with a mantle dotted with landscape pictures, and big windows that overlook the rolling lawn and the marsh beyond. A therapist floats to each of us and hands us a Reeder, while Seth looks over the notebook he scribbles in during each session. Flo said with all the terminology they toss around here, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And they have to test my recall speed, anyway, to make sure I don’t have lasting brain damage.
The therapist’s screen asks me a question.
Which of the following statements are true?
a.Aset is the mother of memory.
b.Memories are discrete units of experience and may be edited or created using the sahu coding language pioneered by Aset.
c.The memorystream is the total collection of an individual’s chronological memories, often used interchangeably with “consciousness.”
d.All of the above.
I tap “d” and a happy bell dings from the device. Still, the therapist frowns.
“Faster, next time?”
“Sure.”
Once we have answered our Reeder quizzes, the therapists drift to other Cohorts on chairs and blankets on the lawn. Seth hits us with his big bro smile. I blank out for most of his opening sermon about how resilient the human mind is, and when I come to,
Minou’s talking about how she remembers a cat she had a couple of years ago. She tells us about Cupcake while I stare at the blue streak in her hair that’s tucked behind one ear, so I don’t have to meet her eyes. A memory struggled to her through her half-sleep this morning, of orange air freshener and a little rough tongue across her fingertips. She squeezed her eyes shut until she could see the room with wire pens in the animal shelter where she and her wife had adopted the cat. Seth nods a lot and occasionally takes notes. Out of all the cats, Cupcake was the only one to walk over to the door of the pen to say hi to Minou and her wife. And that was when they knew.
When she’s done talking, she looks down at her knees and wipes her nose. It’s so quiet that I can hear the water lapping the reed-shrouded shore.
“Another memory of a cat, Minou,” Seth says, with his low voice that sounds like a hug. “Why do you think that is?”
“She was the closest I had to a kid. I cared a lot about her. More than myself, especially at the end.”
Chengmei offers Minou a sad little smile. All I can do is keep staring at the blue streak in her hair.
“And why do you think this memory returned?” Seth leads gently. “Why this moment specifically, and not, say, one of the times when Cupcake jumped on you in bed in the morning, or greeted you after work?”
Minou frowns. “Because I adopted her with Adela. You’re trying to get me to talk about my wife.”
“I’m not trying to get you to talk about anything, Minou. I just want you to zoom out. You’re on a mountaintop looking down at the whole river of your memorystream. Why does your gaze fall on this particular bend in the river?”
She looks past him to the marsh reeds that ripple in the breeze. Yikes. She’s keeping it together better than I would, mid open-brain surgery in front of the group. I’d clam up. Flo has been on me about being closed off, but I haven’t remembered anything about my life that I want to share yet.
Stash, the guy with the translucent skin and purple-dyed mustache at her right, yelled at Seth yesterday about how this shrink talk was bullshit, and Seth had to remind him, unblinking, this is why you’re all here.
“Because it’s the last time we were happy,” Minou says with a tired sigh. “I don’t want to remember this shit with Adela. That’s why I deleted it.”
Seth has an unmoving smile like on one of the faces in the paintings in the manor. I haven’t said a word in group yet, and while Seth introduced me on my first day and said I’d need time to get settled in, he looks at me now like, anytime, buddy.
“It sounds like your mind is telling you what you need to remember in order to move on.” Seth lets this latest wisdom-bomb sit in the air for a while. A ways down the lawn, by the old fountain, some of the
other residents putter around the archery range. Whiz, thunk. Arrows sink into the targets. Minou tucks a stray bit of hair behind her ear.
“Maybe,” she says.
Seth nods to the group. And that’s our cue. We are memories, and memories are we.
* * *
Moving Meditation is always after morning group therapy. Moving Meditation, aka “go for a walk.” I’m out of my seat and away from the others as fast as I can without looking like a complete dick. I pass two other Cohort sessions that just wrapped up, and a woman pops up off her blanket and tells me that when her dad cooked Sunday breakfast, the smell of browning butter filled the whole house. I smile at her and look down at her name, Siobhan, embroidered on her chest. The nametags are so you can put a face to the memories, Flo told me, and respect that other people are on the same journey as you.
Between the colored scrubs, ...
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