Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Reuben checked the brain scan. Normal activity in McClendon’s audio and visual centers. Though Reuben had the volume on the speakers turned down, he could hear the man’s voice as he answered Phoebe’s questions. Phoebe was good at putting clients at ease. That was one of her gifts.

  Phoebe handed McClendon the pad and said, “On the screen you are going to see a number of perception and recognition tests. For example, you might see a page of the letter ‘O’, and among them one letter ‘C.’ As soon as you spot the C among the O’s, touch the indicator to move to the next image.”

  “I did these tests already, at the neurologist’s,” McLendon protested.

  “I know,” Phoebe said. “Just humor me on this.”

  As McLendon moved through the tests, Reuben noted his response. The man took a minute and a half to pick out the N in the field of M’s. A normal response was ten seconds.

  Phoebe thanked him and took the pad from his lap. “Okay then,” she said. “Let me ask a few questions. What did you have for breakfast today?”

  “A bowl of oatmeal. With bananas. Black coffee.”

  “Who is the president of the United States?”

  “Please. Don’t remind me.”

  “Do I need to remind you?”

  Reuben noted his cerebral function. “No, you don’t. Next question.”

  “What is Ohm’s Law?”

  “I’m not an idiot,” McClendon said. A surge of activity in the amygdala. Anger, irritation—fear?

  “Of course you aren’t,” Phoebe said. “You are a grown man, and an electrical engineer. Can you tell me Ohm’s Law?”

  “The current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to . . . to the proportional . . . to the potential difference . . . to the voltage across the two points . . . and inversely proportional to the resistance between them.”

  Phoebe looked at her notes. “Can you tell me about the time you won the Draper Prize?”

  McClendon answered. Reuben’s mind drifted. He wished he could bring Maria in and put her under the scanner. He could ask her questions, watch the activity in her brain, and know for sure how she felt. Then he could take out the ring and give it to her and then she would say yes. They would marry and be together as long as they lived.

  “Tell me about the first time you met your wife,” Phoebe said.

  “It was thirty years ago. I don’t remember the details.”

  “Do you remember where it happened?”

  “Her boyfriend—her boyfriend was another student in the EE program with me at Michigan State. We met at a party, or a restaurant, something like that.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She looked . . . she looked beautiful.”

  Phoebe continued through her inventory of questions. At the end, she asked, “Are there things that you don’t want to forget?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Choice, Reuben thought. Choice was a function of the frontal lobe, the site of reason and analysis. Of course that was layered over activity all the way down to the lizard brain.

  “Mr. McClendon, what you have erased, and the amount, is your choice. In order to give yourself the best chance at recovery, you will have to make some tough decisions.”

  “I know.”

  Phoebe waited, letting silence stretch. Reuben observed the flare of firing neurons in McClendon’s cortex. McClendon leaned forward, his hands clasped together, looking at the carpet instead of at Phoebe. “Ms. Meredith, I’m a man who could recite you the twelve major sections, with the subheads, of the Electrical Engineering Handbook. That’s who I am. And now it’s going.”

  “Yes. It’s going.”

  “I don’t like it. The more I’m willing to erase, the better my chance to beat the Alzheimer’s?”

  “That seems to be the case. This is a radical treatment. Treating Alzheimer’s is not something we normally do.”

  McClendon sat silent.

  “We can peel your memory back as far as you will accept. How do you feel about losing your memories of your wife, your daughter?”

  The temporal lobe activity flared higher, and there was a spike—probably some sharp image brought to mind—in McClendon’s visual memory.

  “Jinny was a surprise,” he said. “We didn’t plan to have children.” McClendon picked at the knee of his trousers. “I didn’t want to be a father. But when she was born—” he paused. “She was like a little animal in the house. I was intrigued by her. I watched her change. I taught her things.”

  He looked up at her. “It was very interesting.”

  “What will you miss the most?”

  In McClendon’s mind: fireworks. Electrical impulses spilled across his brain. Broca’s region, the temporal and occipital lobes, cerebrum, and deep down, in the hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus. Something big, something emotional.

  McClendon leaned back in the chair. He said nothing.

  Reuben recorded it all, but it was useless unless McClendon gave them some outside reference. McClendon crossed his legs, rubbed the palm of his hand back over the top of his skull, flattening his hair. It would help if Phoebe got some verbal correlative out of him.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “How can I say what I’ll miss the most? How can you say what’s the most important thing in your life? It’s—it’s really none of your business.”

  Reuben snorted. It was their business. He would be responsible for navigating precisely these minute regions when the time came to clean his memories. Locate the mysteries. Wipe them out.

  Reuben didn’t need any mysteries. In his pocket his hand played with the case containing the engagement ring. He knew what he wanted. He would ask her tonight. He would not hesitate, he would ask, and Maria would say yes, and they would be together.

  Dan McClendon was willing to take an aggressive stance. Phoebe needed that.

  Most of the people who came to New Life Choices were looking to get rid of some specific memory and go on with their lives. Some of them were frivolous. McClendon was different. He didn’t need to forget anything for emotional reasons—he was dealing with a physiological condition. Alzheimer’s was going to empty his mind like a jug with a dozen leaks, and in the process break him. He was here to empty himself prematurely, with the hope that it would leave him unbroken.

  But the volume of memories he needed to clear in order to do that was without precedent. He would not, in some ways, be the same man. It was unknown territory.

  In the beginning, Phoebe had considered cleaning to be a great boon to their clients. Deeply scarred individuals walked out of the clinic with a new ability to face the world, no longer with some debilitating cloud hovering over their heads. But years of observing people—and helping them—use cleaning for trivial purposes had increased her doubts. What kind of world would exist when everyone, instead of dealing with their problems, simply had them expunged? Her boss Derek seemed blissfully unaware of any drawbacks; he wanted her to take on more clients, but Phoebe was determined not to make cleaning become cosmetic brain surgery for people who got dumped by their girlfriends.

  She needed to get a look at the scans Reuben had made during the screening. McClendon had not been forthcoming about his emotional investment in various elements of his past. Phoebe needed to know where the power memories lay.

  She was packing up her briefcase when a young woman pushed into the office. She had flaming red hair and a distraught expression on her face. “Yes?” Phoebe asked.

  “I’m Jinny McClendon.”

  “Come in. Sit down.”

  Jinny sat in the chair opposite her desk.

  “How may I help you?”

  “Right. I’ll get to the point. I want you not to erase my father. I don’t think you understand the situation. My mother is behind this. She’s wanted to leave Dad for years, but she couldn’t without feeling like the villain. This way she gets him to forget her, stashes him in some institution, and walks awa
y with a clean conscience. And the house, and his investments, and everything else.”

  Jinny McClendon’s face was pale, eyes red. Phoebe tried to assess how seriously to take this.

  She could understand Jinny’s reaction—she had seen variations on it dozens of times before—but that did not make it the best one for either her father or herself. If she talked to her father, he might just change his mind and call off the procedure. For the sake of his daughter’s feelings he might sacrifice himself.

  “Your father won’t be in an institution. I’ve spoken with both of your parents, independently and together. Your mother said that she doesn’t want the house. She wants your father to still live there, so he can have some familiar things around him.”

  “Familiar things? How will he even remember them?”

  “Many of them he won’t. Understand, it’s not easy for him. Cleaning gives him at least a chance of remaining a functioning human being. Maybe even better than just functioning.”

  “But he’ll be alone, abandoned! Who will take care of him?” Jinny stood up. “I can’t take this any more.” She opened the office door, but Phoebe called her back. “Miss McClendon. Jinny.”

  She hesitated, came back, sat down.

  “He must choose what he is going to clean from his memory,” Phoebe said. “Yes, he will be alone, but he will have most of his rational capacities intact. He’ll be able to make a new life.”

  “He has a life already!”

  “You know him better than I. But in order to save himself, he will have to erase the events that he would find it most painful to forget. He’s going to forget you, and your mother, and most of the other people he’s come to know in the last thirty years.”

  “The only things he keeps are the things that don’t matter?”

  “Or the oldest. Alzheimer’s patients often can vividly recall things that happened forty or fifty years earlier, but not remember what they had for breakfast.” Phoebe took a deep breath. Sometimes the best way to deal with reactions like this was to come at them sideways. “Could it be, Jinny, that the reason your father’s erasing you bothers you so much is because of your own needs? That wouldn’t be an unnatural thing—for a daughter to fear the loss of her father’s affections so much that she forgot the cost to him if he didn’t go through with this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that maybe it’s what you want that’s in your mind, not what your father wants.”

  Jinny’s face colored. Quietly, she said, “You’re saying I’m being selfish?”

  “That’s not the best way to put it.”

  Jinny stood silent for a moment. “So I’m selfish. But what about you? Why are you so interested in doing this? I’ve heard Mom say that you’re excited about the chance to use your erasing process to attack Alzheimer’s. There’s big money in this.”

  “I’m not interested in making money.”

  Jinny snorted. “But if it works, your boss will make a lot of money. And you’ll be famous. All because you cleared away half of a man’s life. Aren’t you just a little bothered by that?”

  “Of course I’m bothered. It’s not something I’d do easily. I’ve worried about cleaning. I don’t think it’s a panacea. Far from it, in fact. Too many people treat it as one.”

  “Because you advertise it that way.”

  “I don’t write the ad copy. I deal with the clients. I get to know them, I worry about them, I understand their motives.”

  “What, you’re some kind of goddess? You have no self-interest? You’re getting paid!”

  “Believe me, I could find other ways to make a living.”

  Jinny’s eyes narrowed. “Your conscience is bothering you.”

  Phoebe didn’t know what to say. She sat there.

  “You don’t think this is the right thing to do!” Jinny said. “You don’t care about my father—you’re trying to prove something.”

  Phoebe stood up. “I’ve got nothing to prove. You’re the one who is putting her self-interest above her father’s welfare.”

  “It’s not about helping him, it’s about helping you.”

  “Ms. McClendon, I think we’ve gotten as far as we are going to get. Your father signed the papers. Your mother has power of attorney. If you have issues, you need to take it up with them.”

  Jinny McClendon got up to leave. She stopped at the door and looked back at Phoebe. Phoebe tried not to shrink under her gaze. She was not sure if she succeeded.

  the assistant’s hands were warm as she touched his forehead and throat peeled the paper off adhesive sensor pads stuck them on his temples brow base of his neck right and left connected them to heavy wires that tugged on his skin laid him down on the bed he didn’t like lying on his back it left him stiff but the drug calmed him close your eyes she said breathe deeply think about a pleasant place a place you feel safe and secure the basement the workbench the old radios blow the dust away how many years had this one sat in a barn pigeon shit on the cabinet but when he hooked it up the dial still glowed green it took a while no sound instantly you had to let it warm up the tubes giving off heat glowing in the dusky interior wooden bench top covered with black scars from the soldering iron and a voice came out of the speakers

  her hands on his chest in his hair touching his face you have freckles all over your shoulders she said and he laughed and covered her mouth with his pressed her down onto the motel bed is this a freckle he said touching her with his index finger and she shivered eyes closed eyelashes fluttering sunset light slanting through the Venetian blinds in bars showing the contour of her breasts and the rumpled sheets outside the sound of the surf and someone playing a radio

  the doctor lifted his daughter’s hand on the tips of his fingers and drew him closer and pointed to the newborn’s pinky so tiny so perfect the fingernail so minuscule you needed a magnifying glass to see it but perfect nonetheless and he said see this finger Dad and Dan worried said yes what is it and the doctor said that’s the finger she is going to have you wrapped around and later he would put his own finger into his baby daughter’s hand small pink soft and the hand gripped his fingertip so hard that strength of instinct holding on the way we held onto life don’t let go Dad Jinny said her voice quavering I won’t he said she was wobbling down the street on the bike he was jogging alongside holding the seat don’t let go she said and he let go and she sped off on her own away from him down the slope faster than he could run pedaling now and at the end of the street she stopped awkwardly gripping the handlebars and shouted back her face glowing with triumph I did it

  on the third move his hand slipped and his left foot lost purchase and he fell not so far ten feet maybe but he missed the pad and came down wrong and the snap in his ankle the sound more than the pain told him this would be it for rock climbing and in some way he was relieved Dan are you all right Mickey his partner said everyone in the gym stopping and coming over looking up into their faces that pretty girl he always watched her when she climbed and it wasn’t just the shape of her ass though that had something to do with it couldn’t remember her name that was spring of ’98 or was it ’99 he couldn’t remember smell of sweat in the air the throbbing pain now they helped him up awkwardly icepack and over the PA some song heavy fuzz bass and organ that reminded him of a sixties song he’d heard on his brother’s transistor radio in the back of the pickup on the way to Green Lake

  his brother’s hands on the sides of the cargo deck what was his name he had two brothers and one of them started with an L or was it W how could he forget something like that but he didn’t feel bad about it right now he felt calm it was okay they were going to take care of him it was easier to forget forget because trying to remember only made him anxious and now he wouldn’t have to be anxious anymore and the person beside the bed holding his hand let it go

  Sly was scouting eBay to see what the latest bids were on his merchandise when he got the call.

  “Hello,” she said. “Is this Sylvester Wesley?”


  “Who wants to know?”

  “New Life Choices gave me this number,” the woman said. She sounded tired. “You did some work for them concerning my husband, Daniel McClendon. You cleaned the house for us.”

  Sly remembered McClendon. The item he was checking bids on was one of McClendon’s radios. That was more than a month ago. “Yes, I did. Did I miss something?”

  “No, that’s not it at all. Actually, I need you to—to bring some things back.”

  “Bring things back? That’s not what I do, Mrs. McClendon.”

  “Nonetheless, I need you to bring them back.”

  Sly’s job was making things disappear, and he was good at it. He was a contract employee at New Life, erasing files, destroying records, pulling government documents, and sweeping clients’ homes of objects that would remind them of things they had paid large sums to have erased from their memories. It was a lucrative sideline, but not his day job. Normally, he was a software engineer.

  When they had called him and told him his next assignment was Daniel McClendon, the name seemed vaguely familiar. Then, when they sent him the files, he realized that he had taken a computer engineering class from McClendon a decade before.

  Professor McClendon had been the strangest prof Sly had ever seen. Middle aged, a little slow moving, he conveyed the sense that the math he was so good at was just an elaborate game. In the middle of an explanation he would recite limericks about DRAM, or tell a funny story about the real reason the cell phone was invented, or sing some silly song. He had little patience for the slow witted. He did complex calculations in his head, barely giving the students time to keep up.

  Once a student had asked him to repeat an explanation, and he replied, “Look, I’m not going to repeat it. It’s as simple as two plus two equals four.”