Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  At last, two days after the breakup, she gave in and went out for drinks with her best friend, Stacia. Some part of her still remembered the three A.M. trash talk sessions about guys that she and Stacia had, back in college when the Sisterhood was new, and imagined it could be that way again.

  “Don’t say anything about horses,” Mary growled preemptively at Stacia. “Or getting back on them, or anything else along those lines.”

  “You know me.” Stacia shrugged, raised her palms so her bracelets jangled, and laughed. “I always change horses in the middle of a stream.”

  This was so true. The whole time Mary had known Stacia, almost ten years since college, Stacia hadn’t had a relationship that lasted more than five or six weeks. The six years Mary had been with Roger was like a million years in Stacia-relationship-time. Just hearing Stacia’s laughter made Mary’s shoulders unhunch fractionally.

  They were at the Swan Dive, the place with the white wing-shaped chandeliers and cherry-wood couches, and Stacia kept glancing around to see if there were any cute guys worth throwing some negs at. Mary would never stop envying Stacia’s ability to turn flirtation into a way of life.

  Just when Mary was starting to feel slightly less tragic, Stacia leaned in and said, “You’re totally right to be scared to go back to the dating pool,” using her low, confiding tone. “Dating is a nightmare.”

  At first, Mary thought Stacia was talking about whether Mary could still attract a man, with her cornsilk hair and fading kina-minx features, concerning which Stacia was always volunteering makeover advice. But then she realized Stacia was talking about something more fundamental.

  “Dating is this relic of a primitive age, before kina-chat and smart cookies,” Stacia said. “You have to spend all this time getting to know someone: what they like to eat for breakfast, and all their hangups. And then once you’ve gathered all of this useless information, you probably realize that you’re not compatible after all. And then you have to start the whole process over from scratch.”

  Back when Mary and Stacia first became friends, they’d both worn the black turtlenecks and hiking boots that were still Mary’s daily uniform, but after college Stacia had reinvented herself as an über-femme. Now she had special eyelashes that fluttered all on their own, hypnotically, and her black hair cascaded in waves around her creamy shoulders. Stacia’s ankles crossed sinuously on the bottom rung of the barstool, with her red ruffled skirt lapping against them. Two separate guys were trying to send her drinks, and she was rolling her eyes at them.

  Stacia went on about what a chore it was, getting to know a new person. “You have to wait for him to open up, like the world’s slowest Venus flytrap. And meanwhile, you keep unspooling yourself for him, little by little, just enough to keep him interested, but not so much that you’re oversharing or overloading his buffers. Everybody has sex on the first date these days, but you have to wait until the fourth or fifth date before talking about your messed-up childhood.”

  Around this point, Mary started to cry, for the first time since Roger kicked her to the curb. She would be alone forever, in her tiny apartment with the three rectangles. She couldn’t do this whole dance all over again, the way Stacia was describing it. She usually loved Stacia’s cynicism, but right now she was just too raw.

  “And that’s why I think you should get Roger to do it,” Stacia was saying. “Everybody’s going to be doing it soon, so you’ll just be an early adopter. And honestly, since he’s the one who dumped you, he owes you.”

  “Do what?” Mary was so startled, she stopped sniffling.

  “Oh,” Stacia said. “You know. The memory thing.”

  “Pretend I don’t know,” Mary said. She sort of knew. She’d read about this on the kina-cast a while back. It was the thing where your ex gave you a memory wisp, right? A download?

  “The important thing is, he doesn’t give you all of his memories of the relationship,” said Stacia. “Just the happy ones. The ones from the first two or three months, or maybe four or five if the relationship went on longer. Especially, no memories from the tail end, leading up to the breakup. Not even stuff that seemed happy at the time, because in retrospect it will all seem terrible.”

  “Yeah,” Mary said. “But I already remember our relationship, more than I honestly want to. Why would I want his memories of that stuff? I might as well just jam hot needles into my tear ducts.”

  “It’s not for you, dumbass.” Stacia slapped Mary’s arm. “It’s for whoever you date next. Your new boyfriend can get implanted with all of Roger’s memories of getting to know you. That way, the new guy can know how you like to be touched in bed, and what your favorite flavor of mycosnuff is. He’ll already know all the awkward details, but it won’t feel like too much too soon, because he’ll have memories of learning it all over a period of months. And the best part is, if he gets Roger’s memories and decides he doesn’t want to date you after all, he can get them removed, as long as it’s within a few days. After seventy-two hours, Roger’s memories become integrated with his own, and then they’re permanent.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about this,” Mary said.

  “Well, yeah,” Stacia said. “In the unlikely event I date someone for more than a few months ever again, I want him to do a memory download for sure. Think about it: You wouldn’t get a new kina without transferring over your address book and settings and stuff, right?”

  “I doubt Roger would want to do that,” Mary said. “I don’t even know if he has any good memories of our time together.”

  “That’s why he has to do it now,” Stacia said. “He still has the happy memories, buried somewhere. But every day that passes since the breakup, the happy stuff gets buried deeper and deeper as he convinces himself you never had anything. A week from now, those good times you shared will be beyond the ability of science to retrieve.”

  Mary still wasn’t sure, but Stacia gave her the hard sell: “He owes you. All of that time you invested in him, it’s like you put equity into a home. And now that he’s evicted you, he owes it to you to cash out your equity, so you can put it into a new place. That’s all this is.” When she put it like that, the whole thing made sense.

  * * *

  Seeing Roger’s face for the first time since the breakup caused Mary’s brain to make a correction in real-time—fast, but not fast enough to be painless. The instinctive “partner-bond” signal fired in her brain, causing waves of pleasure and comfort. Like a hot bath on a frozen day. And then she had to pull back, as if the hot bath had turned out to be boiling instead. She had to look at Roger’s perfect hazel eyes and breathe in his pine-forest scent . . . and remember that this was over.

  Mary’s whole life was neurochemistry, so she knew that a lot of this sensation was just the chemical battery in her brain, sparking erroneously based on out-of-date information.

  They met for lunch, the day after Mary’s conversation with Stacia. Mary had the day off from the makery, and Roger could take a long lunch break at his strategic consulting firm, where he was helping to re-position the troubled rejuvenation sector. (Roger had heard every joke about the rejuvenation industry getting old, a dozen times.) They were eating at the same restaurant where Roger had told her that he needed space: a hand-pulled noodle place where a man stood in the front window pulling noodles, 24/7. Mary had loved this restaurant, which had red lanterns, grease-stained tablecloths, and chewy noodles, but now it was tainted forever.

  “I don’t know, Mare,” Roger said, after she explained what she wanted him to do. “I mean, those are private memories. You’re talking about a piece of my identity.

  “Even if they could pull out just the memories pertaining to our courtship—which I don’t believe for a second they can, that’s awfully granular—those are still my memories, they’re personal.”

  “Oh, come on, Roger,” Mary said. “Don’t be a jerk. I’m not asking for your life story. Just a few months of specific memories, which won’t have any of the context.
So they won’t mean the same thing to anyone else that they mean to you. If they do mean anything to you.”

  She was starting to sob again—weakling—so she reached for the longest and slimiest noodle in her bowl and slurped it loudly to mask the sound. She gestured for the waiter and demanded a scallion pancake.

  “You can’t say that.” Roger’s eyes widened in a way that would have melted her brain when they were together. “You can’t say they mean nothing to me. They mean a lot to me. Those memories are precious to me. Of course they are.”

  “I guess not,” Mary said. She had avoided recriminations when he had jilted her. She had taken the bad news with composure, but now this felt like a second jilting. “Obviously, none of this ever meant anything to you. None of it ever mattered at all. Right?”

  Mary never knew what Roger had seen in her in the first place, any more than she understood why he had broken up with her, after six years that had seemed happy to her. The whole thing was a mystery, beginning and end.

  “Did Stacia put you up to this?” Roger said. “I swear, you two were always like this hive mind. The whole time we were together, I felt like I was dating both of you.”

  “Leave Stacia out of this,” Mary said. “This is about you and me.” She stabbed her onion pancake with a single chopstick, skewering and gesturing. “Those memories that you don’t want to share, I bet they’re just memories of you figuring out how to seduce me, so you could use me and get your fill and then throw me aside. You probably treated it just like one of your strategy briefs.”

  Roger didn’t know how to respond to that. For a moment, he just held up both hands, like he was about to gesture. Then he let them drop again.

  “You want to take my memories,” Roger said. “And give them to some other man. My personal memories, of you. And you don’t see how that’s messed up?”

  “I see that you threw me aside, and now you don’t want to give me the one thing that will let me have closure,” Mary said. “You’re probably already dating someone else. Aren’t you?” Roger’s squirming was confirmation enough.

  Guilt won. Roger went to the clinic, which was a glorified kiosk just outside the mall that smelled of ozone, and Mary watched the whole time as the neural sensors danced around the three-dimensional map of Roger’s mind, plucking out the specific bits of his past that related to the two of them getting together. She tried to imagine what the machine was getting. Their first meeting at the Bankrupt Daisies concert, their first proper date when it rained and Roger held his jacket over her head, that time they bonded over both hating Jane Austen, the whole weekend they spent naked, his dad’s funeral. It was all becoming a blur to her, but those months would be preserved. Pristine.

  At the end, Roger looked exhausted, under the weather. “I have to go lie down,” he said. He handed her a sparkly memory wisp, a silver feather floating in a plexiglas cube. She thanked him several times and even kissed his cheek. The cube fit in her purse, next to her mycosnuff and breathspray. She imagined implanting those memories into hundreds of men, thousands even, so they could all remember falling in love with her. And then that thought scared her with its brazenness, so she banished it. She thanked Roger again, and he said it was nothing.

  * * *

  “Oh my god, can I see it?” Stacia stretched out an elegantly manicured hand. Mary only left her hanging for a moment before plunking down the cube containing her happy early months with Roger. “Wow,” Stacia said, “it’s so light. It weighs almost nothing. It’s Moore’s Law in action, right?”

  “I guess so,” Mary said. “Moore’s Law, yeah. Everything gets smaller and smaller, forever.”

  Stacia was staring at the little wisp inside the cube, watching it undulate. Mary realized this had been going on for an uncomfortably long time. “It’s so pretty,” Stacia said.

  “Yeah,” Mary said. She reached out to take the cube back, but Stacia moved out of reach with a dancer’s grace, so that she didn’t quite seem to be dodging.

  They were at the mall, which was a program that lasted approximately forty-five minutes depending on your attention span. With the right lenses inserted and enough smart cookie in your system, you could look at a dozen storefronts per minute, scrolling around you in the spherical chamber with a walkway at its center. Over Mary and Stacia’s heads, palm trees slowly morphed into “futuristic” metal cranes (as in the bird). This mall had gone way downhill.

  Stacia and Mary had originally met when they’d escaped from the same dismal party together in sophomore year of college, where they were the only two smeary-eyed malcontents dressed in black, in a galaxy of pink hoopskirts. They’d formed a club: The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Mary was an aspiring bio-artist, culturing abstract oozes, while Stacia was a shy pudgy computer-grower, but they shared a deep conviction that ninety-nine percent of everything people cared about was false and revolting, like the fake barf on sale at the magic store in this mall.

  They almost went into a hat store that was selling fancy retro bonnets, but then they decided they were bored with hats. “Let’s skip to the food court,” Stacia said. “Wafflecrepes. I’m buying.”

  “Can I have my cube back?” Mary didn’t want to sound pushy or needy, or as though she didn’t trust Stacia. The memory wisp flickered as it caught the sparkly light from the kitchenwares store. One of the clerks in the store waved, trying to get their attention with a fancy spatula, then was gone.

  “I was wondering if I could maybe borrow it,” Stacia said. “Just for a day or two.” She bit her lip and pulled her shoulders inwards, towards her cleavage in her frilly chemise. “Because I would kind of like to . . . to copy it.”

  “You what?” Mary thought she must have misheard over the mall’s schmaltzy orchestral music. “You want to make a backup or something?”

  “No, no, I want it in my head.” Stacia laughed—but it was a nervous, defensive laugh, for a change. “I want to have Roger’s memories in my head. I want those experiences, I want to remember them, like they happened to me. I want to feel what it was like for him. Firsthand.”

  Mary found herself backing away from Stacia a bit, until she was almost inside the make-your-own-stuffed-animal store. The mall stopped changing, in response to her proximity to an entrance.

  “I never knew . . . ” Mary’s mind raced, almost as if she’d had a smart-cookie overdose. She felt her heart clapping. “I never knew you felt that way about me. All this time, we’ve been best friends. Nearly ten years now, I never knew you were . . . you were in love with me.” She made herself stop shrinking away, and come back into Stacia’s orbit.

  “Oh Jesus, no.” Stacia laughed, her normal laugh this time. “Is that what you think? My god, no. I’m as straight as they come, you know that. No lesbian inclinations at all. Jesus. I’m sorry to let you down, I love you as a friend. No, I just want to have the memories. I want to know what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like?”

  “All of it. Falling in love. The start of a long-term relationship. Being a man and falling for a beautiful woman. All of it. I just want to have those experiences in the mix, jumbled up with my real memories. I think it could solve a lot of stuff for me.”

  “But . . . but why Roger and me? Why can’t you just find some random stranger and get his memories? I bet you could buy something on the gray market. Or just ask around. Like you said, everybody’s starting to do this.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same. And just think—this will bring us closer together. Any questions you have about Roger, or about the mistakes you make at the start of a relationship, you can just ask me. It’ll be great!”

  “Uh . . . ” Mary had moved far enough away from the door to the teddy-bear store that it had vanished, and now other stores were whipping behind her. She had a dreadful headache, the kind that started at the top of her scalp and traveled all the way down her spine to her sacrum. She could barely see.

  “It doesn’t take long. I’ll give it right back to you in a day or so,
I promise.”

  “No. Please, no,” Mary said. “Please, just give it back to me now.” She was starting to have a nagging suspicion that this had been Stacia’s plan all along, and the real reason Stacia had been so insistent that she ask Roger for this. “Just, please, give it back.”

  Stacia nodded. “Okay, that’s how it has to be.” She raised up her hand with the cube in it, as if to hand it back to Mary—and then she turned and ran inside a kina kuniya store, disappearing into its maze of shelves and running out the back exit before Mary could even get her bearings.

  Mary was left hyperventilating in a null zone between the mall and the real world, where everything was a whirl of broken advertising images, too fast to make out even with smart cookies.

  * * *

  Mary kept trying to contact Stacia, who had gone off the grid. This was the longest Mary and Stacia had gone without speaking to each other in the past decade. Mary was so freaked out she could barely breathe, imagining Stacia absorbing all the memories of her private moments with Roger, the good times. Making them into a big joke in her head, or worse yet getting ironically sentimental over them. Mary couldn’t sleep or concentrate on anything; she almost let a bad batch through at work.

  Stacia waited a few days before bringing the memory wisp back to Mary—the exact amount of time it would take for the memories to become permanent in Stacia’s brain. Then at last, she arranged a meet in a hotel lobby downtown.