by John Barnes
"Yeah," I admitted, seeing no reason to lie about it. "Every couple of minutes, I forget that I have this problem, and reach for Resuna, the way your tongue looks for a missing tooth. And every time I reach for Resuna, it's not there at all. Nothing like the temporary weird feeling when my copy is being replaced, and for a couple of hours I can't connect to it easily, and the new copy isn't yet using the old memories effectively—that's still Resuna, just Resuna that's hard to reach. This is just as if it had never been there." I ate another couple of bites. "What did you mean when you said I was a good candidate for ... dememing, was that the word?"
"That was the word," he agreed. "Now and again, you know, people do get rid of a meme, or lose one, or it gets knocked out of them somehow. In the old days some of the cowboys were just people who woke up one day with Resuna not running, and they'd slip away and come join us. I don't imagine that's what very many people did. I'd bet that most people reacted the way you've been doing, so that soon as they woke up with Resuna not there, they called up One True on a computer or via some friend, to get another copy loaded in. But a few people would suddenly just not have a working copy of Resuna, and wouldn't want another one, and those people would run off to become cowboys.
"And—this wasn't so much the way it was with Resuna as it was with some of the older memes—sometimes you could trick a meme out of people's heads. Sometimes the drugs they used to use on mental patients would work, and sometimes shock, like an electric shock, or a big dose of insulin, or a blow to the head. Which I guess is how you got dememed. So what's it feel like to not have Resuna in your head?"
"Don't you know? I mean, you never have had it, so you must know what it's like."
"Yeah, but what I'm asking you, or I guess what I should have asked you, is what does the change feel like? How's it different now from what it was before?"
I thought about it, taking my time. When a guy saves your life, and would have had every reason to just kill you, you owe him at least the courtesy of a good answer to his questions. I knew if I had been running Resuna, like normal, it would have had some very convincing argument against that feeling, but right now it was just me. After the long pause, I just said, "Oh, like, uh, it feels a bit—a little bit—like it used to feel before memes, when a friend would die or leave. All of a sudden there's somebody you keep wanting to talk to and can't, you know? Not too different from..." I stared at the blank rock wall opposite and let the thought form. "Not too different from waking up from a dream, calling for somebody you only knew in the dream, and then knowing they aren't there and can't be there."
Dave nodded. "Poetic." When I stared blankly at him, he said, "Well, that's one effect we've identified. Clearly being dememed makes people get poetic." He smiled, and I made myself smile back, though I wasn't sure that I had any sense of humor about that subject just then. After an awkward pause he added, "I got some coffee brewing, too, if you'd like some. Do I have to tie you up every time I leave the room?"
"I guess not. I wouldn't get far, naked, and I'm not stupid enough to try anything yet."
"Glad you put the 'yet' in there," he said. "I'd have to be pretty damn dumb to expect you not to lie to me, but I'd sure appreciate it if you don't lie to me more than you feel you have to, and if you don't let me catch you doing it too often."
I considered. "Why don't you just figure that I won't pass up any good chance for an escape, but I won't do any petty shit that just makes both of us uncomfortable? I'll lie if it'll help me get away, but not just to fuck with you."
"Deal. Let me go get that coffee. Bet you're tired of jackrabbit soup by now, too; in another hour I'll be done cooking up an elk loaf with some reconstituted potatoes."
My stomach rumbled and I said, "I think I can help you out with that. How many days have I not eaten solid food?"
"Since you got hit on the head," Dave said. "Sorry not to be able to tell you more than that, but it's always possible that you have a perfectly good copy of Resuna, and what's keeping Resuna from restarting itself, and turning you again, might be nothing more than having lost track of the time—it does depend partly on that internal clock it creates inside you when it takes over. So, I can't answer that question."
I shrugged. "Well, anyway, I can tell it's been a long time, and I don't really have to have things more specific than that. And the food sounds wonderful."
Dave "went out to the kitchen, and I continued to sit on the bed, not really thinking of anything, just enjoying being awake and not feeling awful. There would be time enough for more advanced pleasures, later, perhaps, but right now sitting and waiting for a good meal, and being well again, was about all I needed.
When Dave came back with the coffee, which smelled so wonderful that I was beginning to wonder if he had been slipping You-4 into my soup (maybe because making me happy all the time would help keep me dememed? I didn't know a thing about how dememing worked—hadn't even known it was possible until it happened to me), I had thought of another question to ask him. "How did you build this place? I know that sounds like a stupid question."
"Not really. What you want to know is how I got this place without tipping off the satellite, and the answer was good luck and patience. I found this old mine, a hundred yards from a hot spring, half-choked with dirt, and dug it out. I carried the dirt with me, on the regular rounds during the day, in a pack I made from a gunny sack with a few holes cut into it to let the dirt dribble out as I walked. It took a long time but I had a long time. The first couple of years I lived in a shelter like yours, basic military-surplus thing, under the overhang, where there was room to set it up. After two years of digging out a pack-load of dirt per day, I had a nice medium-sized room to live in. And now after a couple of decades, I've got a bigger house than I ever had back before I went off to be a cowboy. With ten years of a pack-load a day, if you're careful not to miss a day, you can have a pretty big hole."
"You're still digging?"
"It's something to do. I have a room in back that's going to be a warm, comfy library; it happened I found an old armchair that was in great shape, so that made me think how much I would enjoy just having that as my regular place to sit, enough to bother bringing it up here, but then I didn't exactly have the perfect place to put it. So I went looking for a rug to go with it, and a floor lamp, and when I had all of that, well, two bookcases fell into my hands, which was fate's way of telling me that that armchair needed a library to be in. And I already had some books. All this finding stuff and figuring out what to do with it was all across a number of years, mind you, while I was still digging out the hot-tub room, so I had lots of time to do my planning."
"A hot tub?"
"Well, I've got hot water, more than I can use. Might as well. Though I admit that I also use the tub for laundry, and dishes. Room in it, though, for three or four people to soak; I just like having the room. Anyway, once I got the tub room done, it was time to start on the library. Figure another two years and that'll be done as well, which will be good. I ain't as young as I used to be, and a warm place with good light to read by is starting to seem more and more important, as I think about what kind of a setup would be best for a rickety old man."
I looked at him intently for a minute, and then finally blurted out, "Jeez, I can see why you'd need to plan for when you're old, but you don't look a day older than when I thought I'd sent you over the cliff."
He laughed. "Well, you look awful good for an old fart of your age, Curran. Especially for one who was in a dangerous occupation for a long time. People living a long time and people looking younger than they are, are things that happen, you know, with better medical treatment and all."
"I guess so," I said. I didn't believe him. In the first place, except for his recent foray into rape and robbery, Dave hadn't had access to much of that medical technology, nor could he have had much in the last fifteen or twenty years.
Also, he was exaggerating about how well preserved I was. I could tell you ten things that are different
in my appearance, now, from what it was ten years ago: more pounds in bad places, less hair in good places, some lines and wrinkles. Dave, on the other hand, looked exactly the way he had looked when I had last seen him in the flesh—better, in fact, since now he wasn't tired out by a long chase. Somehow nothing had happened to his face or body at all. My degree of preservation might have been mildly interesting in our present world full of well-preserved old guys; but his was dead solid freakish. That he was trying to conflate the two suggested that he was unobservant (unlikely, in someone who had survived so long out here) or more likely that he was trying to put one over on me (very likely, in a cowboy).
I thought about pressing the point, but either he was telling the truth (and there was nothing more to tell) or he was lying (and wasn't about to tell me), and what he would say would be the same either way.
So I changed the subject. "And have you been living on canned goods and hunting all this time?"
"If you're a decent hunter and there's just one of you in a wilderness area, it isn't that hard to keep yourself fed. Didn't even have to work that hard. The canned stuff is good for the things I can't grow, but I grew some of my own stuff too. I'd plant vegetables on hillsides under upside-down aquariums, which make perfect ready-to-go coldframes—I raided a couple of old pet stores in Gunnison and Montrose for those. My plantings were too small to show much from orbit, as long as I kept them scattered out pretty wide, which meant I'd have to do some walking, but I had time to do it. Now and then a deer would smell something it wanted and knock over an aquarium, or a gopher or rabbit would tunnel in for it, but not as often as you'd think, because herbivores basically aren't too smart, and my growing sites were so scattered that if they raided one aquarium and figured out how to do that, by the time they ran into another one, like as not they had forgotten. And I could combine making the rounds of my aquariums with my hunting. Even doing all that stuff, I had plenty of time to dig and think. It's been lonely work, hard work, but it ain't worn me down yet."
I shrugged. "It might even be why you still look so young," I said, hoping to keep him thinking I was believing him. "Abundant exercise and a good diet, far away from all the places where there are leftover plagues from the wars—probably a healthier life than I've been leading." I took another sip of coffee. "This is as good as I get at home. Reconstituted?"
"Yeah, I stole a reconstitutor a while back."
That reminded me, for the second time in a few minutes. Since I couldn't afford to offend him, I did my best to repress a shudder.
All the same, he must have seen the change at once. "What is it?"
I don't usually like to pick a fight with my host, and I was naked, disarmed, and completely at his mercy. Plus we'd already had a theoretical discussion about his cutting my throat. But the unfortunate habit of a lifetime—saying whatever popped into my head—caused me to blurt, "When I was prepping for this mission, One True took me through Kelly's memory, and all I can say—" I stared at him and tried to reconcile this soft-spoken, seemingly gentle man with Kelly's vision of him bouncing on top of her and laughing at her cries of pain and fear "—shit, I don't know what to say. How could you do a thing like that to a little girl, and her mother?"
He looked puzzled and said, "I didn't have much choice; they'd caught Nancy a long time back, even before your group caught up with me, and once they found out she was a cowboy's wife, they really poured on the Resuna copies until she was completely theirs. And Kelly never had a chance—she was probably given her first copy of Resuna before she was three years old. But you know what Robert Frost said—home is where, when you've gotta go there, they'll have to take you in—and I was good and sick, so I paid them the visit. I was damn lucky to get away, and even luckier that I could dememe them long enough to have my chance to say hello to my wife and daughter; there are days when I feel like, now that I've done that, I can die easier."
I was staring at him now, unable to believe what was either an audacious lie, or ... the thought connected. "You mean you not only raped that poor child, but she was your own daughter?"
Now he was staring. If there'd been a third person there cruel enough to laugh, he'd probably have busted a gut at the spectacle of two men who had suddenly dropped their brains on the floor and didn't have anything with which to think of picking them up. Finally, he sputtered, "What the fuck are you talking about, you crazy fucking idiot?"
I was not used to being called a crazy fucking idiot—with everyone running Resuna, profanity and insult are both very rare—but despite being startled, I could see that he was pretty stressed. And I knew that this wasn't a turn the conversation should have taken, but hell if I saw any way out but forward. "That's what was in her memory," I said. "I played through the whole memory copy, and believe me, I'd rather not have, and I wish like all shit that she didn't have that memory, but she does. You came in with a gun—the poor kid had never even seen one before, do you realize how much innocence you were spoiling?—you threatened them into giving you medicine and food and their reconstitutor, and then you made that little girl watch while you raped her mom, and then you raped her. That's what she remembers. And thanks to the transference from One True, I remember every bit of it, and you better believe I wish I didn't. Now you tell me that was your wife and daughter that you did that to. Well, ek-fucking-scuse me, and I guess now you'll kill me for saying it, but out of all the dirty, vicious, hate-filled cowboys I've ever hunted, you are the only one I've ever really despised." It was about there that I noticed I was shouting into his face, standing over him where he sat on his stool, fists on my hips like I was going to yell him into submission, with some of the effect spoiled by the fact that I was buck-naked.
Dave stared into space. If I'd had pants to throw on and a weapon to hand, I could have taken him right then, right there, without much difficulty, I'm sure. As I watched, a tear ran down his cheek. "You damn well ought to be crying," I said.
He wiped his eyes, stared at me, and said, "Of course you believe that memory."
"What are you going to try to do, pull some Freud-bullshit and tell me she wanted to remember something like that, and made it up?"
He shook his head slowly. "Curran, I don't have a damn idea in my head for how to tell you this so you'll believe it, but... hey, did you ever meet Kelly? Or just that copy of her memory?"
"Well, of course I just got the copy of her memory! What would you think? One True never inflicts unnecessary pain. It wasn't going to make her sit there and tell me all about it. Not when her copy of Resuna could just load the memory up to One True, and my copy could load it down to me, and I would know what had happened to Kelly far more vividly than she could ever have told it, and with no pain to her. Why would we need to meet face-to-face?"
He shrugged, got up, seemed about to speak, stopped himself, looked down at the floor, visibly got himself under control, and started to pace, gulping at his coffee, as if the solution to some hard problem might be anywhere on the floor if he could just find it.
Finally he looked up; the whole silent performance had taken over a minute, and I didn't believe any of it; he'd had days to plan whatever he was going to say now.
"You ought to ask," he said, "why your only access was that copied memory. Couldn't her copy of Resuna have just taken control, so that you could have met her face-to-face? Wouldn't you have had a stronger feeling if you had really known Kelly instead of just importing that one memory? Wouldn't that have motivated you more, if you had looked into her eyes and promised her you'd catch the asshole rat-bastard that did that?"
"Might have," I admitted.
"So, One True can do damn near anything and it couldn't do that for you?"
"It might have hurt her—"
"A conversation? Even though it might be emotionally painful for her, it couldn't be as painful as what had already happened. And One True could erase her memory of the conversation easily enough, if it needed to. Hell, it gave Nancy a whole set of imaginary memories about being wi
th squatters in Vegas Ruin, and being a slave there, to replace our marriage. You should've seen how bewildered she was when I dememed her and she suddenly knew who I was—and who she was—again! One True could have let you talk to Kelly—should have and would have—if the memory that was copied to you was accurate. Even if it had hurt Kelly at the time, her copy of Resuna could control and erase the pain as necessary. And meanwhile you'd have been just that much more motivated, and she'd have had the comfort of knowing someone was going out there to catch me. If One True was telling you the truth, if I had really done those things to her, then that was what it should have done, and if it knows us as well as it says it does, it would have done it."
"But I felt her personality," I said. "Real and human and twelve years old, not the kind of thing that even One True could make up—"
"Oh, I'm sure One True started with some memories from Kelly, when it created the one it gave you. Probably even copied over some bits and pieces from some adult woman who was raped as a child—the War of the Memes went twenty years and sooner or later pritnear every girl and woman who had the bad luck to live in those years got serbed, so One True probably had a wide selection of rape memories."
"I never serbed anybody," I pointed out, "and I was in the War of the Memes."
"I was too, and I never serbed anybody either!" Dave said. He was glaring at me, dark eyes fierce under his bushy, unkempt brows.
"Until recently when it was your wife and daughter," I said, sneering, maybe hoping he'd just kill me.
"That's what I'm fucking telling you, Curran. The memory is false. One True probably started with some of Kelly's fear, from when I broke into the house, which it got via her copy of Resuna. Then it fused in a bunch of rape memories. You damn well know that memes can create memories that you experience as real—weren't you ever hit with Unreconstructed Catholic, or didn't you know someone who was? And don't you remember how everyone who ever ran Unreconstructed Catholic all remembered kindly Sister Agnes and lim koapy Father Jim from first grade at St. Aloysious School? And being their favorite and feeling secure and safe with the Church guarding you? Or Real America's memory of the Fourth of July when you were in eleventh grade and went to the high-school prom in Brightsburg, Vermont, with the red-haired girl that used to pitch for your Little League team? You know memes can make you remember things that didn't happen, dammit."
