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database links or bio-mods that let them do something specialized, they’re
the ones getting the jobs.
Usually your family’s there to wish you luck. Mine wasn’t, of course. And
Grizz never said anything about her home life. The only times I’ve asked, she
shut me down quick. Which makes me think it was bad, real bad, because
Grizz doesn’t pull punches.
You could tell who expected to make it and who was going through the
motions. Grizz marched up to her test machine like she was going to kick
its ass three times around the block. I slid into my seat and waited for
instructions.
You see vidplots this time of year circling around the Exams. Someone gets
placed in the wrong job—wacky! Two people get switched by accident—
hilarious! Someone cheats someone out of their job but ultimately gets
served—heartwarming and reassuring!
In the programs, though, all you see is a quick shot of the person at the
Exams. They don’t tell you that you’ll sit there for three hours while they
analyze and explore your wetware, and then another two for the memory and
experience tap.
And after all that, you won’t know for days.
Grizz wouldn’t say anything about how she thought she’d done—she was
afraid of jinxing it, I think, plus she was still pissed at me about the Lorelei business.
I could tell as soon as we walked out, though, she was happy. I walked her
back to Ajah’s and said I was heading down to the court to see if our forms
had come in. She nodded and headed inside. It was a gray morning. But
nice—some sunlight filtered down through the brown haze that sat way up in
the sky for once. The smoke-eater trees along the street gleamed bright
green, and down near the trunks sat clumps of pale-blue flowers, most of
them coming into their prime, although a few were browned and curling. I
could feel all that memory on my back, lying across my shoulder blades, and
I found myself Capturing.
I’d only heard it described before—most people don’t have the focus or the
memory to do it more than a split-second. But I opened to every detail: the
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watery sepia sunlight and the shimmer playing over the feathers of the two
starlings on a branch near me. The cars whispering across the street and two
sirens battling it out, probably bound for St. Joe Emergency Services. The
colors, oh, the colors passing by, smears of blue and brown and red flashes like song. The smell of the exhaust and dust mingled with a whiff of Mexican spices
from the Taco Bell three doors down. Every detail crystal clear and recorded.
I dropped out of it, feeling my whole body shaking, spasms of warring
tension and relief like hands gripping my arms and legs.
I tried to bring it back, tried to make the world go super sharp again, but it
wouldn’t cooperate. I stood there with jaw and fists clenched, trying to force
it, but nothing happened.
Within three days, Grizz had heard. A year of training at the Desmond
Horticultural Institute, then a three-year internship at the State Gardens
in Washington. Student housing all four years, which meant I wouldn’t be
going along.
At first we fought about it. I figured it was a no-brainer—go there jobless
or stick here where I had contacts, friends ready with a handout or a few
days’ work. But once Grizz had been there a while, she insisted, she’d be able
to scrounge me something so I could move closer.
Ajah’s girlfriend Suzanne got her set up with a better wardrobe and a
suitcase from the used clothing store she ran. I bought her new shoes, black
leather boots with silver grommets, solid and efficient looking.
“What are you going to do without me?” she asked.
“I’ve gotten by before,” I said. “You work hard for us, get somewhere. Five
years down the line, who knows?”
It was a stupid, facile answer, but we both pretended it was meaningful.
And we did stay in touch, chatted back and forth in IMs. She was working
hard, liked her classmates. She read this, and that, and the other thing. They
kept telling her how well she was doing.
And unwritten in her messages was the question: What are you doing with
it, with the memory?
Because certainly it was doing the same thing on her body as it was on
mine: thickening like scars healing in reverse, bulky layers of skin-like
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substance building over each other. In Ajah’s bathroom mirror, I could see
the skin purpling like bruises around the layers. My sole consolation was
Capturing; extended effort had paid off and I could summon the experience
longer now, perhaps ten seconds all together. I kept working at it; Captured
pieces sell well in upscale markets if you can get a name for yourself.
And I had the advantage of being able to do it as often as I liked, although
each time still left me feeling wrung out and weak. I kept trying to Capture
and never hit the memory’s end; the only limits were my strained senses.
My eyes took on a perpetual dazzled squint as though holy light surrounded
everything around me.
I never told Grizz though. Nor about the fact that every time I went to
jack into the Net, the drug got between me and the interface. I was glad I
hadn’t seen Lorelei—I was starting to wonder if she’d given it to me
deliberately. It scared me. I lost myself in Capturing more and more. I
started delivering packages for Ajah and Susanne, and laid aside enough
cash to buy a simple editing package for it.
Editing is internal work, so you can do it dozing on a park bench if you’ve
got the mental room to spread out and take a look at the big picture. I did.
What I wanted to do was start selling clips on the channels. It’d take a
while though, I could tell, and I was still working out how I’d upload it,
given the problems jacking in. I figured at some point I’d burn it off to flash memory and then use an all-accessible terminal, with keyboard and mouse.
In the meantime I caged what meals I could, slept on a round of couches,
and showed up at Ajah’s often.
Sometimes after a meal, he’d roll out the still on its mismatched castors,
and we’d strain its milky contents in order to drink them. He and I would
sit near the window, passing the bottle back and forth.
Early on into Grizz’s apprenticeship, he asked me about the memory. He
said “That med complex near the dock, the one that went bust a few
months ago, did you guys ever score out of there? I know that was in your
turf.”
“Went in one time and scored a little crap but not much.” Our hands
were both touching the bottle as I took it from him. I added, “Nothing but
some old memory,” and felt the bottle twitch in his sudden anguished grip.
“What did you do with it?” he asked, watching me pour.
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“We used it. How do you think she did so well on the Exams?”
“But you didn’t,” he said, confused.
“Well, Grizz isn’t a mor
on, and I am, which would account for it.”
He grunted and took the bottle back.
“If I’d taken stuff from there,” he said. “I’d just not mention it to anyone
ever. There have been some nasty customers asking around about it.”
I went to visit Grizz a few weeks later; her roommate was out of town for
the weekend. We ate in the cafeteria off her meal card: more food than I’d
seen in a long time, and then went back to her room and stripped naked to
lie in each other’s arms.
We could have been there hours, but eventually we got hungry and went
back to the cafeteria. The rest of the weekend was the same progression,
repeated multiple times, up until Sunday afternoon, and the consequent
tearful, snuffling goodbye. I’d never seen Grizz act sentimental before; it
didn’t suit her.
“You need to do something,” she said, looking strained.
“Other than planning on riding your gravy train?”
“It’s not that, Jonny, and you know it.”
I could have told her then about the Capturing, but I was annoyed. Let
her think me just another peon, living off dole and scavenging. Fine by me.
The wall phone rang, and she broke off staring at me to answer it.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello?” She shrugged and hung it up. “Nothing but
breathing. Fuckazoid pervs.”
“Get much of that?”
“Every once in a while,” she said. “Some of the other students don’t like
Dregs. Afraid I might stink up the classroom.”
It irritated me, that she’d said how much she liked it and now was asking
for sympathy, as though her life were worse than mine. So I left it there and
made my goodbye. She clung to the doorframe, staring after me.
It wasn’t as though I had much to leave behind; it was perhaps my mind’s
sullen statement, forgetting my jacket. I got four blocks away, then jogged
back, ran up the stairs. Knocked on the door and found silence, so I slipped
the lock and went in.
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CAT RAMBO
By then . . . by then she was dead, and they had already left her. The
memory was stripped from her skin, leaving ragged, oozing marks. Her
throat had been cut with callous efficiency.
I stood there for at least ten minutes, just breathing. There was no
chance she was not dead. The world was shaking me by the shoulders and
all I did was stand there, Capturing, longer than I had ever managed
before. Every detail, every dust mote riding the air, the smell of the musty
carpeting and a quarrel next door over a student named Dian.
I didn’t stick around to talk to the cops. I knew the roommate would be
there soon to call it in. I might have passed her in the downstairs lobby: a
thin Eurasian woman with a scar riding her face like an emotion.
When I got to Ajah’s, they’d been there as well. He’d taken a while to die,
and they had paid him with leisure, leisure to contemplate what they were
doing to him. But he was unmistakably dead.
They had caught him in the preparations for a meal; a block of white
chicken meat, sized and shaped like a brick, lay on the cutting board, his
good, all-purpose knife next to it. “Man just needs one good knife for
everything,” he used to say. A bowl of breadcrumbs and an egg container
sat near the chicken.
Someone knocked on the door behind me, and opened it even as I
turned. It was Lorelei, still well-heeled and clean. Her bosses must be
paying well.
“Jonny,” she said. She didn’t even look at Ajah’s body. Unsurprised. “Is
it true?”
“Is what true?”
“They said he gave up a name, just one, but when I heard the name, I
knew there had to be two.”
“What was the name?”
She chuckled. “You know already, I think. Grizz.”
“Because of the memory?”
“It’s more than memory. It grows as you add to it. Self-perpetuating. New
tech—very special. Very expensive.”
“We found it in the garbage!”
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MEMORIES OF MOMENTS, BRIGHT AS FALLING STARS
She laughed. “You’ve done it yourself, I know. What’s the best way to
steal from work?”
“Stick it in the trash and pick it up later,” I realized.
She nodded. “But when two streets come along, and take it first, you’re
out of luck.” Her smile was cold. “So then you ask around, send a few
people to track it.”
“Did you mean to poison the Net for me? Was that part of it?”
“You mean you haven’t found the cure yet?” she said. “Play around with
folk remedies. It’ll come to you. But no. I was angry and figured I’d fuck
you over the way you did me.”
“Do they know my name?”
She smiled in silence at me.
“Answer me, you cunt,” I said. Three steps forward and I was in her face.
She backed up toward the door, still smiling.
The knife was in easy reach. I stabbed her once, then again. And
again. Capturing every moment, letting it sear itself into the memory,
and I swear it went hot as the bytes of experience wrote themselves
along my back.
“They don’t—” she started to say, then choked and fell forward, her
head flopping to one side in time with the knife blows. She almost fell on
me, but I pushed her away. Her wallet held black-market script, and plenty
of it, along with some credit cards. I didn’t see any salvageable mods. The
GPS’s purple glimmer tempted me, but they can backtrack those. I didn’t
want anything traceable.
All the time that I rifled through her belongings, feeling the dead weight
she had become, I played the memory back of the forward lurch, the head
flop and twist, again, again, her eyes going dull and glassy. The thoughts
seared on my back as though it were on fire, but I kept on recording it, longer and more intense than I ever had before.
She was right about the folk remedies; feverfew and valerian made the drug
relax its hold and let me slide back into cyberspace. I’ve published a few
pieces: a spring day with pigeons, an experimental subway ride, a sunset over
the river. Pretty stuff, where I can find it. It seems scarce.
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CAT RAMBO
One reviewer called me a brave new talent; another easy and glib. The
sales are still slow, but they’ll get better. My latest show is called “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars”—all stuff on the beach at dawn, the
gulls walking back and forth at the waves’ edge and the foam clinging to the
wet sand before it’s blown away by the wind.
I don’t use the Captures of Grizz’s body or Lorelei’s death in my art, but I
replay them often, obsessively. Sitting on the toilet, showering, eating,
walking— Capturing other things is the only way I have to escape them.
Between the royalties and Susanne’s continued employment though, I do
well enough. She’s moved into Ajah’s place, and I’ve taken the room behind
the clothing store where she used to live. I cook what I can there, small and
tasteless meals, and watch the memories in my head. Memories of moments,
as bright as falling stars.
188
Pat Cadigan
Rain woke me. I thought, shit, here I am, Lady Rain-in-the- Face, because
that’s where it was hitting, right in the old face. Sat up and saw I was still on Newbury Street. See beautiful downtown Boston. Was Newbury Street
downtown? In the middle of the night, did it matter? No, it did not. And not a
soul in sight. Like everybody said, let’s get Gina drunk and while she’s passed out, we’ll all move to Vermont. Do I love New England? A great place to live,
but you wouldn’t want to visit here.
I smeared my hair out of my eyes and wondered if anyone was looking for me
now. Hey, anybody shy a forty-year-old rock ’n’ roll sinner?
I scuttled into the doorway of one of those quaint old buildings where there
was a shop with the entrance below ground level. A little awning kept the rain
off but pissed water down in a maddening beat. Wrung the water out of my
wrap pants and my hair and just sat being damp. Cold, too, I guess, but didn’t
feel that so much.
Sat a long time with my chin on my knees: you know, it made me feel like a
kid again. When I started nodding my head, I began to pick up on something.
Just primal but I tap into that amazing well. Man-O-War, if you could see me
now. By the time the blueboys found me, I was rocking pretty good.
And that was the punchline. I’d never tried to get up and leave, but if I had,
I’d have found I was locked into place in a sticky field. Made to catch the b&e kids in the act until the blueboys could get around to coming out and getting
them. I’d been sitting in a trap and digging it. The story of my life.
They were nice to me. Led me, read me, dried me out. Fined me a hundred,
sent me on my way in time for breakfast.
Awful time to see and be seen, righteous awful. For the first three hours after you get up, people can tell whether you’ve got a broken heart or not. The
solution is, either you get up real early so your camouflage is in place by the time everybody else is out, or you don’t go to bed. Don’t go to bed ought to
work all the time, but it doesn’t. Sometimes when you don’t go to bed, people
PAT CADIGAN
can see whether you’ve got a broken heart all day long. I schlepped it, searching for an uncrowded breakfast bar and not looking at anyone who was looking at
me. But I had this urge to stop random pedestrians and say, Yeah, yeah, it’s true, but it was rock ’n’ roll broke my poor old heart, not a person, don’t cry for me or I’ll pop your chocks.
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