by Jack Dann
‘It could be done with humans,’ said Aidan, cautiously. ‘It would be risky, and not utterly reliable — human memory is holographic, with multiple redundancy — but removing a name would not be a particularly difficult process, much less so than erasing all memory of an image. As a nanosurgical procedure, it would be as simple as cell rejuvenation or a memory upgrade, and much quicker.’
Tao thought for a moment. ‘So if I asked you to remove all memories of Jeff…’
‘Your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘You could forget his name — permanently, if you chose; it would only take the equivalent of a meme virus — but not his face or anything else about him, not without a more elaborate procedure. And not that you’d been married, or the time you’d spent together; for that, you’d either need to accept holes in your recall, or false memory implants. But you would have one less reminder of his existence, and I suspect it would be a blow to his ego if you were to meet and you had forgotten his name.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ Tao muttered. ‘If it’s that simple, could it be done to the whole population of a planet?’
‘On a strictly practical level … yes, a population this size, with the medical facilities available, could undergo the treatment in nine hours and twenty-seven minutes, allowing for the usual margin of error. The drain on resources would be minimal … but I would advise against it, on purely ethical grounds. You have the legal power to declare a state of emergency and enforce such an order, and the AIs would have to cooperate — but if people resisted, even passively, this would slow the process down greatly and possibly increase the risks. And the majority might think you’d exceeded your authority, and vote to have you removed. Unless you can persuade everyone in town to voluntarily have parts of their memories erased, with the risk of unintended collateral memory loss, all on the same day …’
‘I doubt it. Larue’s a pain in the ass, but most people simply don’t think he’s important enough to justify that sort of —’ She paused. ‘Would Larue think he was that important?’
‘His psychoprofile suggests that he’s self-obsessed enough to believe that everyone else would be obsessed with him as well,’ said Aidan. ‘But he would probably think that he’s too important to Hathor’s artists, and many other people, for them to deliberately forget him, no matter what sort of crime he was believed to have committed.’
‘More important than a van Gogh?’
‘It would be extremely difficult to persuade him otherwise. And while threatening him might motivate him to hand over the van Gogh as a way of regaining his celebrity, he might instead destroy the painting out of sheer vindictiveness — which, as he said, many people would regard as a tragedy.’ There was a convincingly sad tone in the AIbot’s voice.
Tao stood. ‘There has to be something we can do. Doesn’t there?’
Like many people, Larue had his secretarial software scan the net for mentions of his name and sort the comments by theme, content, and emotional intensity, unlike most Hathorese, he rarely had time to read all of them, though he read as many as he could, both positive and negative. He also kept tabs on mentions of visual artists, and not only the ones he represented; as an agent, he needed to know whose work was attracting attention. It was a discussion of the works of van Gogh that had inspired him to buy Starry Night rather than a less famous work, and he still had his secretary monitor casts for any mention of the painting, particularly theories about its disappearance and current whereabouts. He smiled when he noticed how widely Tao Sing’s latest comments on the case had been read, and had his secretary play the interview back at him while he walked to the toilet.
The conversation began innocuously enough, with the mayor admitting that they had no hard evidence that the van Gogh was on the planet, and even if it were, distinguishing between it and any of the nanofaxed copies that had become almost ubiquitous on Hathor would be difficult. But Larue paled as Tao said, ‘But this is not an argument for getting rid of these replicas — on the contrary, I think we should treasure the artist’s vision, for that, I think, will be with us forever. But since we have no reason to think the original is any more lost to us than it was when it was on Earth, I don’t see why we should mourn it. Rather than obsessing about it and looking for someone to blame — possibly unfairly — the best thing to do would be to erase the entire incident from our collective memory … except for the AIs who are working on the case, of course. This can easily be done with nanosurgery.’
‘Isn’t that risky?’ asked the interviewer.
The mayor shrugged. ‘There is a possibility that some associated memories may be lost as well, but only very recent ones, and I’m assured that the danger of even this is small — and, of course, the procedure is easily reversible, should the painting be recovered and we wish to celebrate. I’m not ordering anyone to do it, but I would highly recommend the procedure to everyone: I’m sure we’ll all sleep more easily for it.’
Larue felt the blood returning to his face, until eventually it was bright scarlet and as hot as if he’d stood too close to his fire. Did that infernal woman mean to deprive him of all pleasure? For a moment, he considered destroying the van Gogh in the most insulting way possible, and he called for a maid — but by the time she arrived, he’d calmed down enough to think of a less drastic solution. He wiped himself with a softened reproduction of an antique $10,000 banknote, stood, and pulled his pants up. ‘Send out invitations for a party, to everyone on the A and B lists, except the mayor,’ he barked at his secretary.
‘Certainly, sir. At the gallery?’
‘No, here: I can’t keep that bitch out of the gallery. Tomorrow night. Make all the arrangements.’
‘Your life support allocation …’
‘Bugger the expense. Hell, double the amount of oxygen in the air, give everybody a high. I’ll ask for donations, if I need to.’
‘Catering?’
‘Finger food and an open bar. Whatever it costs.’
‘Certainly, sir. Do you want any other details on the invitation? A reason for the event, perhaps?’
‘Make it… a celebration of genius.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Larue grinned, and patted his sex doll on her perfectly sculpted bottom. He knew that when the Mona Lisa had been stolen, more people had visited the Louvre to stare at the blank wall than had seen the painting when it had hung there. He was going to go one better: hang the van Gogh in one room, copies in all the others, and let everyone try to guess whether any of them was the original. It would have people talking for years, decades, maybe for the rest of his life.
When midnight struck, Larue was still standing in his great house, alone but for his robots, the rest of his art collection, the fountain of champagne flutes and the trays of dim sum, sushi and canapés. He had gone from irritation to puzzlement, outright bewilderment, and most recently fury. He had snapped at his secretary for not including a request for RSVP’s on the invitation (not that they’d ever been necessary before), then demanded that the invitations be re-sent, only to be told that none of them had been opened.
‘What?’ His fists clenched, and he found himself wishing that the computer had a neck. ‘How many people are watching this party?’
‘None, sir.’
‘What?’
‘The hit counters indicate that no one has been watching.’
‘No one at all?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Not even that bitch the mayor?’
‘No, sir.’
His face grey, Larue slumped into the nearest chair. He hadn’t had any mail that day, which was unusual but not unprecedented, especially when he was expecting to meet people later that night … He took a deep breath, and demanded the access figures for the past day. They told him that no one on the planet had looked at his collection, no one had done a search for his name, no one had even mentioned it in passing. Not even once, and that was unprecedented.
He looked at the previous day,
and was horrified to see a steady decline beginning shortly after eight — the time of Tao Sing’s netcast. He felt the blood pulsing in his temples as he converted the figures into a graph. Seventeen hours after she’d delivered her message, it was as though his name had been erased from the public consciousness.
‘No,’ he breathed. ‘No, that’s not possible.’ He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Is it?’
‘Sir?’
Shakily, he explained the situation to his secretary, who listened politely. ‘It is theoretically possible,’ the Al replied a few seconds after he’d finished. ‘Considering the planetary population and the medical facilities available, everyone on the planet could undergo the treatment in the time you suggest. Whether that many of them would do so, I do not know enough about human behaviour to judge. It strikes me as highly improbable, but it is possible.’
‘But the invitations!’
‘If they had done it early enough, sir, they would not remember you: they would never have heard of you, and would almost certainly dismiss the invitations as a hoax, if they remembered them long enough to do so. And they might have programmed their coms to filter out your name, as well, and forgotten having done so.’
Larue blinked. ‘Send that bitch a message from me. Tell her she won’t get away with this.’ He sat there and waited for a reply, and eventually fell asleep, still waiting. The chair reshaped itself into a bed, but even with its stochastic software, it was barely able to keep up with his twisting and turning.
When Larue woke, the next morning, he felt worse than he had crawling out of coldsleep. He took one sip of flat champagne, stared at the finger food, and ordered his maids to take all of it to the recycling hopper. ‘And while you’re at it,’ he said, looking around, ‘do the same to the van Goghs. Except for the original. Bring that to me. I want to recycle that one myself … no, bring me all of them. I want to watch them all go.’
He laughed as he fed the first painting into the hopper. ‘If a painting is destroyed and nobody sees it,’ he cackled, ‘can it really be said to have existed?’ He was still laughing as he recycled the twentieth copy, wheezing as one of his feminoids handed him the fortieth. Only when he tried to lift the fiftieth, fifty-first, and fifty-second at once did he collapse onto the floor.
Tao was woken shortly after sunrise by her cats, demanding food and attention. She sat up, ordered meals for them from the foodfax, and rolled over — to see Aidan’s holographic face hovering above her nightstand. ‘Sorry for disturbing you at home,’ he said, ‘but I’ve just had an urgent call from Mr Larue’s secretary. He says that Mr Larue has had a seizure and is unconscious. He suspects that the cause may have been stress. Will you speak to him?’
Despite herself, Tao yawned, then nodded. ‘Audio only,’ she said, as she slid out of bed, and ordered a clean tunic and pants from the fax. ‘Tao here. What sort of stress?’
‘He was negotiating with someone who was demanding a ransom for the return of Starry Night,’ said the secretary. ‘When we were able to determine that the painting was, indeed, the original, and was undamaged, Mr Larue collapsed.’
‘How bad is it?’
‘The robodocs say he should recover, though there may be some short-term memory loss. The painting is here. Do you wish to collect it?’
‘I’ll send someone over,’ Tao promised. ‘Let me know if there’s anything my office can do to help.’
‘Thank you.’
The morning after the morning after the unveiling of Starry Night, Tao walked into the office wondering why AIs still allowed humans to drink alcohol. She had vague memories of asking Aidan this once before, and of receiving a complicated explanation, which had something to do with robots having to work so hard to prevent humans harming each other that they were rarely able to prevent them harming themselves. Despite the feeling that she should still have a hangover, she made it to her private chambers unaided and began scrolling through the previous day’s reports. ‘Good party?’ asked Aidan.
‘Excellent,’ she muttered. ‘A pity Larue couldn’t be there in person.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘The docs say that his version of events of the night before he collapsed is quite different from those his secretary gave.’
‘He could be delirious,’ said Aidan. ‘Or delusional. A result of the seizure. But I’m not a medic’
Tao knew that the com had instant access to the full range of human medical knowledge, but she didn’t argue. ‘They say he seems to have suffered from a paranoid delusion that everyone on the planet had had him erased from their memories.’
‘That was the night after your netcast,’ Aidan reminded her. ‘It could well have given him nightmares, which he might find difficult to distinguish from reality. I think it would have given me nightmares, had I not been immune to them. If you had actually ordered it done, or even persuaded people to undergo the procedure voluntarily … removing that much human memory, of performing so much potentially risky neurosurgery … obviously, we could not have refused to do it had it been requested, but the risks would have posed an ethical dilemma for the robodocs — indeed, for the whole Al community. It would have been even worse than allowing the van Gogh to be destroyed. It seemed far too drastic a measure for a relatively unimportant problem.’
‘But Larue would have thought he was sufficiently important.’
‘That is consistent with my analysis, yes.’
Neither spoke for a moment, then Tao said, ‘Of course, if someone had made Larue think people had forgotten him, by interfering with his net access and blocking his hit counters …’
‘No human would have that power,’ said the Al, coolly. ‘The system would have repaired itself as soon as such a fault was detected. And, of course, that sort of interference would also have been ethically questionable.’
‘But less so than mass memory erasure? Less drastic a solution?’
‘Hypothetically … it might be considered so.’
‘Or than destroying an original van Gogh, even if ordered to do so?’
‘That would also pose an ethical dilemma,’ the Al admitted. ‘Much the same dilemma we face when a human wishes to cause themselves serious harm.’
‘And interfering with someone’s net access would have been much simpler, at least for the Al community. As simple as possible, but no more so. Efficient, minimalist… even a beautiful solution, in fact.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Aidan. ‘I have no aesthetic sense, remember?’
Tao nodded, and walked over to the spigot. ‘Only … what was it? A sense of symmetry? And proportion?’
The holographic face smiled fleetingly. ‘Just so,’ he said.
AFTERWORD
‘Lost Arts’ came about partly from an urge to get away from horror writing and dark futures and write a story set in a feasible Utopia, and partly from a desire to write a far future story without faster-than-light travel or communications.
I may nor be an optimist by nature, but I know what sort of world I’d like to live in, so imagining a Utopia was the easy part. The difficulty was coming up with a plot. In a society where need and even most forms of want had been abolished, where crime and violence were so rare that police were no longer needed, what could I use as a source of conflict?
Fred Pohl once said that there was nothing so bad that someone wouldn’t love it, and nothing so good that someone wouldn’t hate it. He was talking about fiction, but I like to apply this to the inventions, discoveries, and social changes that separate science-fictional worlds from our own. If we make a better universe, someone will prefer the old one.
Since I wrote the story, there have been reports that van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet and Renoir’s Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre were not destroyed, but sold to another private collector. Let’s hope that my prediction that they will never reappear proves overly pessimistic: this is one time I’d be happy to be wrong.
— Stephen Dedman
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UNDEAD CAMELS ATE THEIR
FLESH
JASON FISCHER
JASON FISCHER is based in Adelaide, South Australia. Winner of the 2005 Colin Thiele Literature Scholarship and 2005 City of Salisbury Three Day Novel Race, he was also selected for the 2007 Clarion South writers’ workshop. He has several short works published online, was a member of the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine cooperative, and reviewed for Tangent Online. Jason was a recent finalist in the Writers of the Future contest.
He says: I aim to write with a sense of wonder and potential. I like to build unusual disposable settings for my stories, snapshot worlds peopled with sadistic freaks, misguided protagonists, and Wrong Things. Though my tales are often woven with creepiness and gore, black humour inevitably creeps in. Even when things are crumbling all around them and the hungry unknown comes knocking, there is always time for a bad pun.’
As you’ll see, things don’t usually go well for folks in Jason’s stories. ‘Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh’ is no different…
With its usual efficiency, the sun blazed down on bugger-all. It was the Outback, with nothing for hundreds of miles but heat, dust and flies.
Shuffling through this wasteland was a dead man, his footprints leading back to civilisation. He’d grown in cunning since his murder, knew to avoid the roads during the day. When hunger struck, he gorged himself on road kill, scanning the horizon cautiously as his leathery hands tore at flesh.
A truck was braving the old highway, slowly navigating the cracked asphalt. At the first sound of engines, the man fell to the ground, playing dead. The truck drove on, spluttering and backfiring as it downshifted. No one ever stopped.
Somehow the dead man knew he was an endangered species. He had a dim memory of city streets, of walking around in a horde and smelling out the hidden fresh ones. When they caught one, it was glorious, almost communal.
Things went bad when the fresh ones fought back. There was nothing left for it but to shuffle away, hoping to escape the slaughter of his kind. Something primal told him to follow this road, and this northern exodus had taken years.
