Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “I don’t smoke,” Bruce said, confused and bleary-eyed.

  “Then now’s a good time to try it: you’ll like it.” She stood, taking Bruce’s hand. “Come on: let’s go outside. Get some air.”

  Bruce rose, a little unsteady, and looked down at Rebecca. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to…have a cigarette, I guess.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” Rebecca said, not getting up, speaking to Bruce but keeping her eyes on the woman.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Bruce said, and then the woman fairly pulled him away, into the dissipating crowd.

  Well. Let love bloom where it might. Or a good lay, anyway. Though likely not that good.

  But that was over. What had Rebecca come to sit on this couch to do? Oh yes: chill out, and check out the skyline, and try to enjoy the pleasure of being alone in a crowd.

  But it was not two minutes before some other dude with gin on his breath sat down next to her and said, “Listen: I don’t know you, but I’ve seen you here at this party all night, and I just want to talk to you for a little while. Just…I have things, in my head. Just want to talk.”

  This guy (and Rebecca had already forgotten his name, just as she was already failing to remember whatever—what’s-his-name…Bruce? Bruce—whatever Bruce had said about whatever it was) wanted to talk, at some length, about a taco truck that he visited on his lunch break, almost every day. “There’s this taco truck, it’s out front of the building around lunch time: a real taco truck that’s all dirty and sketched out, not one of those big clean shiny fake ones that’s run by some corporation. And the girl who works in the taco truck is some kind of art-school chick with pink hair and a little piercing in her nose. And the thing is—I’m married, but I totally want to marry this art-school chick. Not bang, but marry. I look at her as she leans over to hand me this greasy taco that might have a little bit of rat meat in it for all I know, and I feel like a vampire, I want to just jump up and latch my teeth into her neck and give her that bite, you know, just freeze her as a second-year art student who’s selling tacos part-time to cover the rent. ’Cause what’s going to happen is: she’s going to finish art school, she won’t be able to get a job, she’ll let her piercing close up and dye her hair brown and go legit, she’ll end up at some kind of soul-killing job in a cubicle, she’ll marry another dead soul, then one day she’ll come out to the taco truck that is the sad highlight of her day, eating this rat-meat soft taco instead of charging a forty-dollar pizzetta to the corporate account is the only act of subversion available to her, and she’ll see some wiry scruffy dude serving up tacos and think, I want to marry that guy. And it won’t be some kind of, you know, escapist fantasy. The thought will hurt. Like getting slapped hurts.”

  Rebecca was too drunk, but at least she was aware of it—she knew that she was comprehending but forgetting, and knew that words were merely passing through the mesh of her mind instead of sticking there. She wanted to respond: clearly he’d poured his heart out over whatever it was, and some acknowledgment of that was the least she could do. But the subtleties of reliably coherent speech were well beyond her capabilities at this point—any idea she had would fall out of her mouth in a slurred tangle of syllables, and she would be so embarrassed, she would have to deal with that look someone gives you when they’re trying to pretend you haven’t done something extremely embarrassing, that way they look away and say Aaaaanyway. So she settled for arched eyebrows and the slightest of nods, playing the silent sage.

  It worked! The guy smiled. “I shouldn’t have told you all that,” he said. “But I just…it just came out of me. Stupid story. Cheesy little story.”

  “S’okay,” Rebecca said, trying to ignore the way the guy’s face was blurring as the room rocked back and forth. Her brain and stomach were beginning tense diplomatic negotiations.

  The guy stood. “Well: see ya.”

  Rebecca lifted a hand in a desultory wave as he backed away, but soon someone else slid into his vacated spot on the couch, a woman, the one from the beginning of the party who Rebecca thought had had that nanotech skin-resurfacing procedure done. “Excuse me?” she said. “I…I just wanted to tell you that you have this look about you. Like, a glow. Can I just…be here, to talk with you for a second?”

  Rebecca felt glass sliding against her fingertips: she looked down to see that as the woman spoke she was extracting the empty glass from Rebecca’s grip and replacing it with another, this one full of something clear and strong.

  She looked up from her seat to see that there were a half-dozen more people standing around her, making a show of looking away, but still waiting, with the fidgety nature of those unused to needing patience. Was that…were these people actually in a line?

  Many of those who remained at the party at this point, close to one a.m., had seen their fortieth birthdays, and so if their memories of the world before the advent of the Internet seemed almost ancestral to them, passed on through blood instead of having been obtained by firsthand experience, at least they had a dim idea of a past world in which you could remember what you wanted to remember, and forget what you needed to forget, a world that existed before fear of the permanence of information changed each and every utterance into a self-conscious performance. In the new world a woman who was blackout drunk was the rarest of beauties: how often could you have the pleasure of speaking to someone while being dead certain that they would never remember what you said? Who would pass up the chance to write history on water?

  And so each of the last guests sat down next to Rebecca, one at a time, to toss their confessions into the bottomless pool of her alcohol-addled mind. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’ve been cheating on my husband. It’s not out of revenge—it’s not like he deserves it or anything—but just out of boredom. Also, his face has changed. It looks…I don’t know. Like dough. Like he eats nothing but cake, morning, noon, and night. The guy I’m cheating with still has cheekbones. I shouldn’t tell you this, but sometimes in stores I get a little light-fingered: I have for decades. I toss the trinkets in a dumpster as soon as I get outside—it’s just the rush, you know? Beating the guards; beating the cameras. Knowing something that the cameras don’t know. Having a secret. I shouldn’t tell you this, but last night for dinner I just ate an entire jar of candy sprinkles, the kind you put on cupcakes. I looked in the mirror and my teeth had turned eight different colors. I brushed them until my gums bled. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have no idea what I’m doing at my job and I’m supposed to be in line to run this company. Basically I say things like This is a high-stakes endeavor, guys and If we reclaim the buzzwords, we reclaim the market and everything just kind of works out. I mean, if I can get by at this level knowing as little as I do, the guy at the top may not know a goddamn thing. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I just bought this toy. It’s got one knob here, and another knob here. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have this kid now, it’s eighteen months old, and—listen to me. It’s. I’ve been drinking. I have to remember. I have this kid and he’s eighteen months old and when I look at it in its crib I don’t feel anything. Not love or hate or anything. I literally feel more affection for the purse I got on sale last week. And I meet all the other mothers for afternoon coffee and they’ve all parked their strollers at the coffee shop entrance like they’re Harley hogs, and I listen to them billing and cooing, baby this and baby that, mine’s crawling, is yours talking, baby baby baby, and I feel like such a fucking fake. I can’t remember the last time I sat down in a chair for an hour to read a book in peace and quiet. I shouldn’t tell you this, but there are times at work when I’ve been staring at the same spreadsheet for two straight hours and I’ll just quietly reach into my pants and stroke myself a little: not going all the way and bringing myself off, I’m not crazy, just getting kind of halfway there. Because I need to remind myself that if I can do that, if I can get a hard-on even while I’m looking at this spreadsheet, then I’m still an animal, and that means I’m still human. But I hav
e this fantasy where I get hauled in front of the head of HR and he says, I hear you were pitching a tent while looking at the April sales forecasts. And then I get promoted. I shouldn’t tell you this, but whenever I see one of those Muslim women in public with her head covered by a scarf, I think about just reaching over and ripping it off and running my fingers through her long dark hair, right in front of everybody. I think about the look on her face when I do it. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I love it when my husband’s away because at night I get an entire queen-size bed to myself. I sleep sprawled on my back like a child making a snow angel, and as soon as my head hits the pillow I’m out for a solid nine hours. Bliss. I shouldn’t tell you this, but sometimes when I’m alone in the house I hang bedsheets over all the mirrors: it just makes things easier. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’ve been having these weird dreams like every single night for three weeks now, where I’m being contacted. Not by ghosts, exactly, but people from other histories, where things turned out differently than they did here. And they’re all envious. And they all say: You are so lucky. You live in the best of all possible worlds. And you don’t even know it.

  What—

  What the—

  Where? What’s that?

  Neet neet neet neet. Alarm.

  Not fire: clock. Not danger: alertness.

  But the light isn’t right and the world is at the wrong angle.

  In front of Rebecca—no, beneath her: she was hanging off the edge of a bed—was a carpet, industrial, the pattern one of navy and burgundy triangles. On the carpet was a dark brown pool of: ugh. It was a few hours old. There were chunks of undigested food in it: the sight of them as the stink of the puke hit her face made her dry-heave, her stomach muscles twisting themselves in pain as a rope of yellow bile dangled from her lip. She spat it away.

  Next to the puddle of vomit was a trash can, which presumably she’d aimed for in the middle of the night and missed. She slid over and looked inside—ungh, she’d left a gift there, too.

  Where the hell was she? The alarm was still buzzing insistently. Oh. Yes. Hotel. New York City hotel room, as the sun’s persistent rays shone down between skyscrapers and peeked around the edges of privacy curtains. The alarm clock sat on the nightstand: like hotel room alarm clocks generally were, it was crazily complicated, but a couple of blind slaps at the top silenced it, at least for a little while.

  What time was it?

  Eleven forty?

  Shit!

  She pulled herself up to a sitting position, leaning back against the headboard. In a hotel room. Checkout time at noon, probably. But how did she get here?

  Then she saw that propped against the lamp on the nightstand was a little cream-colored envelope, with a single word embossed across it in dark blue foil:

  brictor!

  Oh. Oh no.

  With shaking hands (half from DTs; half from terror) she took the envelope from the nightstand, opened it, and pulled out the matching piece of stationery inside. The message was handwritten, the letters loopy and childlike. Britt.

  Hey, Becca—

  I don’t know how much you remember about last night. (I bet not much: things got a little crazy!) We decided to put you in a hotel so you could sleep off the fun times. (Don’t worry about it: it’s on us. We passed the hat and everybody chipped in a couple of bucks. It was the LEAST we could do.) I called your place, too—your sitter said she’d stay with Sean until you get back, but she’s charging time and a half and she sounded pretty pissed off on the phone. We can’t do anything about that, though! So don’t hang around: if you catch the 12:30 train out, which you can if you check out by noon—oh by the way you’re at 33rd and 7th, near Penn Station—you can get back to Stratton by a little after 2:00.

  It was so, SO good to see you. We all had SO MUCH FUN. It was just like old times, in more ways than one hehe. Let’s not wait forever to do it again!

  Britt

  P.S. Srsly: don’t WORRY about this. We’re your FRIENDS. FORGET about it.

  Eleven forty-four now. Checkout in sixteen minutes. There were a lot of unanswered questions here.

  Had she made such an unimaginable ass of herself last night that Victor (or, worse, Britt) had decided she was not welcome to sleep it off at their place, but that she was too drunk to dump on the street without feeling guilty about it?

  But then Britt wouldn’t have left such a nice note. And that postscript: what was that about? Was that like, We’ve all been there, so no worries?

  The last thing she remembered, she thought as she pulled herself out of the bed—her clothes were still on, including her shoes; really, she could just grab her purse and go—was sitting on that couch and talking to what’s-his-name, who was it…Bruce. Bruce had said something about his job, and he had this girl on his arm he’d just met there that he was…that he must have been really into. Rebecca remembered them leaving so they could go get it on, and then…not much after that. There was some talking to someone or something. But the party as a whole had been kind of subdued and adult, with many of the people there being Victor’s coworkers: it wasn’t the kind of party where someone would paint a pentagram in the middle of the floor and try to summon Astaroth. It was unlikely that it got too out of control.

  Rebecca shuffled into the bathroom, which looked awful—the toilet was unspeakable, with vomit coating the inside of the bowl and spattered on the outside; more puke painted the floor next to the shower. But surely the cleaning ladies of this hotel had seen worse.

  Eleven forty-eight: no time to linger. She pulled down one of the plush white towels from the rack mounted over the toilet and wiped down the stains as best she could. She wanted to at least give the impression that she’d made an effort.

  God, Sean must be losing his mind right now: he hated when people didn’t stick to their promised schedules. She’d pay the sitter beyond the call of duty: time and a half was asking too little. Between the expenditure for bonus babysitting and the Reagan she tossed on the bed on the way out in mute apology, this was getting to be an unexpectedly expensive outing.

  She took the elevator downstairs and hurried out of the hotel, tossing the keycard at the front desk without waiting to see if the woman behind it picked it up. Ten minutes of purposeful striding (each click of her high heels keeping time with an icepick stabbing at the back of her eyes) got her to the bowels of Penn Station, and though she really could have stood to find a toilet stall somewhere to sit and be nauseous, even a grotty Penn Station toilet stall, the place where Despair made its home, there was no time—the train she needed to board had issued its final call, and she scooted on board the double-decker, getting a seat alone up top, in a rear car, before the train got under way.

  She leaned her head against the window with her eyes closed and her hand on her chin, trying to look as if she was not ill, so much as deep in thought. Boarding the upper floor of the double-decker may have been a mistake—the swaying motion of the train car up here was jostling her delicate stomach around inside her, and she was really longing for a nice clean sparkling toilet right now, just imagining leaning over and gagging and spewing up the rest of what was in her, thinking about that good, good feeling you have after you’ve gotten poison out of your system, the spiritual relief that comes from your body’s involuntary confession.

  She must have made an absolute fool of herself: not just some penny-ante acting out, but something completely deplorable. And the worst thing was that she could be sure that Britt would never, ever tell her. That was the bargain that drunken friends made: whatever you did during a blackout dropped out of history. If she called Britt up and sheepishly said, “Hey, did I do anything crazy last night?” then Britt would be guaranteed to reply, “Oh, nothing at all, nothing at all, we didn’t even notice anything wrong, just forget it,” no matter what happened—

  —oh God. As her stomach muscles clenched without warning, she felt bile burble between her pursed lips, felt it collecting in the palm of her hand, felt it running
down her arm to pool in her lap. This was what it was like to feel pure unalloyed shame, though even this was probably not the shame she’d feel now if her actions last night, whatever they were, hadn’t been stricken from the record. She furtively looked around her: no one was paying attention. There was a teenager watching some kind of action movie on a tablet; there was a guy with monitor shades who was shouting that you couldn’t possibly realize who you were fucking with if that was the deal you had the nerve to bring to the table; there was a young woman wearing a clunky pair of pink headphones, bobbing her head in time to a secret syncopation. No one noticed the quietly retching woman in the seat near them, or everyone pretended not to notice. Which, in the end, was much the same.

  26

  GRAND PROTECTORATE

  It was Carson’s love of science fiction that awoke within him the desire to become a scientist, though the chain of events that led from one to the other was not what one might have expected. As an adolescent Carson had spent one long summer devouring the classics of golden-age SF that took up dusty racks in the back of the local public library, checking out a seemingly endless series of smelly, coffee-stained omnibuses with yellowed paper and loose bindings, their detached signatures Scotch-taped back in. He was too young then to be annoyed by the workmanlike quality of sentences more notable for their concepts than their felicity, but he liked thinking about what he would later learn is called “worldbuilding” by science-fiction writers: he liked to consider the invention from whole cloth of cultures and languages that only vaguely recalled those with which one might be familiar.

  Through junior high school, and into college, Carson built a world in a stack of fourteen thick spiral notebooks. It was not so much a narrative as a travelogue of an imaginary place. The time was the year 141,015 AD, otherwise known as the 562nd year of the Founding of the Grand Protectorate. The setting was Jupiter, along with sixteen of the largest moons that orbit the gas giant. Each one of the moons was home to a different species that had evolved from humans over the past 140,000 years: the Pa’Thrawn from Ganymede were cat-like creatures who excelled at hand-to-hand combat; the mysterious beings known only as the Kin lived on Io, and were telepathically linked so that any one of the Kin was involuntarily privy to the thoughts of all; the Zik-Zik of Amalthea possessed space-folding technology that would allow them to instantaneously teleport from one place to another; and so on. Each of the emperors of the sixteen moons of the Grand Protectorate held a key to an indestructible strongbox kept at the heart of the planet Jupiter itself; the strongbox contained an object whose true identity had been lost to history. It was known only as the Gift. But the millennia-old ancient scrolls that had been passed down to the monks of the Grand Protectorate implied that whoever obtains the Gift would acquire ultimate power: eternal life, omniscience, and all sorts of other good stuff. But even if you could manage to extract the strongbox containing the Gift from the planet’s core, the box required all sixteen of its keys to open. And so the members of the Grand Protectorate were perpetually at war with each other in an attempt to collect the keys and gain ultimate power for themselves.