“It’s just that… before, I mean. You used to disappear a lot. You’d come and go whenever you wanted, and I don’t want you to feel like a prisoner, but—God, am I making any sense?”
She rubbed his back with the palm of her hand and gave him a quick peck on the forehead. “It’s cool, Dad. I get it. I screwed up.”
On the coffee table were curled e-papers. Jonah’s drafting pencil had rolled to the floor. She recognized the woman emerging from the thin lines and rough markings. The prominent cheekbones were defined with light shadows. Mesa knew her mother’s face only from her father’s drawings and the rare mem recording she kept in her bedroom.
She took a deep breath then continued. “I wasn’t thinking about you. I was focusing on myself.”
“You should be able to do that, though. You deserve your own space, time to yourself, whatever. Call next time, OK?”
She gave him another quick peck then pushed herself up. “I need to study.”
“You’re doing great, you know.”
She beamed. “It feels like it. I think I’m finding my groove.”
A smattering of data chips were splayed across the desktop in her bedroom, along with empty coffee cups, which she dumped into a small trashcan. Her clubbing outfit went into a hamper filled with the last few days’ worth of pending laundry.
She fished the DRMR pad from a desk drawer and uncoiled the thin black cable. She scooped back her hair behind her ear and plugged the male end of the cord into the port that lay flush with her skin. An electronic chill bloomed inside her as the devices in her skull mated with the peripheral device and queued up the menu. The display came alive, splayed across her retinas. She gave the play button a mental tap, and the data began synchronizing with the installed REMINDER software.
Developed by DARPA to help brain-damaged soldiers recover from trauma, REMIND mimicked the hippocampus and aided long-term memory storage. DRMR, an earlier DARPA invention that had expanded into the civilian market, relied heavily on the hippocampus. Because that segment of her brain was severely damaged, DRMR was largely useless. However, with the addition of the REMIND prosthetics and some rewiring, her DRMR became a natural delivery system for the REMINDER protocols.
Three years earlier, she had been abducted and suffered severe trauma at the hands of a madwoman, Alice Xie. Mesa had woken in a hospital with no memory, no identity. A stranger had been beside her. Her father. He’d done everything he could to help, but any hope of recovering her lost past had vanished. Her life prior to that reawakening was gone forever.
She’d relearned many of the skills she had once had through a series of progressively difficult learning modules. With the REMINDER downloads came homework—lots of it.
The last three years had been grueling but progressive. Mesa was a quick learner, and her degree of determination, commitment, and achievement astounded her doctors and private tutors.
Her tutors believed that in another year, she would be able to pass the GED and start hunting for colleges. She wasn’t sure what she would study, and she rarely thought about that aspect of her future. Although she couldn’t remember her past, the void of things forgotten clung to her like a shawl. She was more interested in unearthing her previous life and learning more about her own history than worrying about what might become of tomorrow.
By the time the first tutorial was finished, her coffee was cool. Still, the acidic bitterness set off a spark of pleasure. She shut her eyes briefly, smiling to herself. She interrupted the dataflow and dislodged the chip before hunting through the rest scattered on the desktop.
She swiveled the chair around, propped her feet up on the edge of the bed, and leaned back. Mesa plugged in a new chip and let a scrap of the unremembered past wash over her.
Mesa was two years old, running barefoot through the grass. She wore purple pants and a T-shirt with a big yellow flower on it, her full belly poking out beneath the fabric. Her face was chubby, and she was constantly laughing. A smile stretched so widely across her face that her cheeks nearly pushed shut her eyes. Large and black, those almond-shaped eyes tilted upward, the clearest mark of her Japanese heritage from her mother.
Her laugh was infectious. She clung to Selene’s index fingers as she and Mesa twirled around the lawn. A slight breeze ruffled their long black hair.
“Ashes, ashes,” Selene sang.
Mesa’s laugh built into excited shrieks. Her head tilted back toward the sun as she spun. Her favorite part was coming up.
“We all fall down!”
Mesa let go of Selene’s fingers and flung herself back, squealing as she fell. She gyrated on the lawn, kicking her arms and legs in the air, laughing and laughing. Then Selene was on top of her, tickling her ribs and grabbing playfully at Mesa’s little feet, her fingers drawing more excited bouts of laughter from the child as they drew across her soles. Mesa was laughing hard, out of breath, her cheeks rosy. She stuck her tongue out between her tiny, perfect teeth.
“Ashes,” Mesa said, the word too large for her mouth. “Fall down!” she shouted, rolling about in the grass, grabbing clumps of green in her tiny fist.
In her bedroom, Mesa could feel the heat of the remembered sunlight warming her. A flush of joy bloomed deep in her core, imitating the original. The memory wasn’t hers, nor was it Selene’s. The memory belonged to Jonah. He’d given Mesa a bag of these chips—his collection of memories from her childhood. Cherished recollections. He’d lain in the grass that day, watching his wife and daughter enjoy a perfect moment, and more than twenty years later, he’d shared that moment with his daughter, who had no recollection of him or herself. Although Selene had died years before Mesa’s problems, the woman’s affection for Mesa’s youthful counterpart had endeared her greatly. Her mother’s love swam across the ages to her, and Mesa wished for some way to thank her.
A few dozen more memories littered the desk and its drawers. Even more were scattered across the web, archived in deeply buried caches of sites such as MemSpace and Episodic. She’d found a few, posted by Selene more than a decade ago, but the search hadn’t been easy. More were out there, she knew. There had to be.
She finished the coffee and unplugged, calling it quits for the day. She felt antsy and confined, stricken with a hard-core case of cabin fever.
“I need to take a walk, get out and stretch for a bit,” she said.
Still dressed in Kaizhou’s clothes, she said goodbye to Jonah and promised to call, but she didn’t think she would be out late.
Even as the door closed behind her, she wondered how it would be to leave and never come back. To disappear. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the errant thought. But she knew how much irreparable pain that would cause Jonah, and as she had before, she dismissed the idea before it could fully form. Even though her psychiatrist suggested keeping an open line of dialogue with her father and sharing her thoughts and feelings with him, she kept that secret to herself.
That and one other.
Convergence Page 27
