Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 116

by Neil Clarke

  But they didn’t have minds like Cianna.

  She watched the children playing for a while before she moved along.

  She drifted from house to house. Each held pieces of Cianna’s life: a childhood in Shelbyville, Indiana, then a move to the east coast and Baltimore as a teen, then college at William & Mary. Ambitions for a job, thwarted or at least stifled by marriage to a high school sweetheart.

  Not the boy with the black curls, but he remained in every scene, some childhood friend that Cianna had managed to retain, unlike most. A constant, even up to the present day, she realized, catching a passage that smelled of yesterday, where the two stood talking. In this memory, Cianna was animated, lively, almost a voluble chatterbox. Shi expected a conversation about the memory palace process, but they didn’t say a word about it, caught up in an argument that she didn’t entirely understand, about a movie with an unexpected ending and whether or not it was possible to see it coming.

  “It’s a matter of red herrings,” Cianna insisted, but the man, whose name she never spoke, laughed at her, saying it was more subtle.

  It sounded a little like a meta-conversation, the sort of dream construction that can usually be peeled away into layers of meaning and signifiers, but though she listened for a few more minutes, she didn’t know how to read it. Perhaps she’d come back to this moment.

  After what felt like weeks, the hour timer on the machine dinged, and Shi pulled back, reluctantly, into the confines of her own head. She stretched and released Cianna from the machine, helping her stand up. The old woman’s hand was warm and leathery, but she only touched Shi as long as she needed to in order to keep her balance, then let go with a hastiness that Shi thought bordered on distaste.

  She said to Cianna, “You could challenge the competency hearing.” Better to say it now, when there were no live recording devices and, if questioned, she could say that Cianna must have misunderstood her and heard what she wanted to hear.

  But the old woman only blinked at her. Shi saw suspicion in the stare, and distrust. She said, “You have a remarkable mind. Surely it must . . . ”

  “The judge,” the old woman said, speaking clearly and not at all as though she had been silent till this point, “is a friend of Ruth’s.”

  The implication was clear.

  “Another judge . . . ?” Shi said.

  “They’ll only find another place to put me,” the old woman said. She drooped as though suddenly tired, as though she had been walking along with Shi in the physical world. “I don’t know what I did to make them hate me so,” she whispered to herself. “I only tried to help them be all that they could be, and when they failed at that, they said it was all my fault.”

  Shi kept silent. She had looked at the records. She didn’t like to be a bigot, but people who tended to keep a single gender often seemed to have other issues. Maybe she was misremembering or distorting that in her head, but it seemed true enough when she matched it against every client she had dealt with.

  She was paid to analyze people, to understand why they did what they did, because it helped her construct alternate lives for them. Once this technology had been designed for nursing homes. Then the real breakthrough had come, and humanity realized how useful they were, these minds that were a diminishing quantity. Only a few more decades of them, perhaps, before that supply was exhausted by the depletions of time.

  But she was not a family counselor, not trained to fix broken relationships. In fact, she’d been encouraged to help make things worse if she could, in order to encourage the older person to abandon their children and their own lives, in order to take on the existence that she offered them.

  She crossed to the poster in her office. A spaceship, a vast colony ship ready to take its slumbering, frozen cargo out into the universe, a ship driven by one of these minds, the consciousness wandering its memory palace, living out a thousand lifetimes, while the unconscious systems, the autonomic ones, drove the important parts of the ship, just as they had once driven blood and breathing and balance, all automatic and unthought of.

  Years of life . . . centuries, really. A body that was virtual, that never tired, that could instantly fly or change or whatever without tiresome surgeries or modifications. Who could resist something like that?

  No, the old woman would like it. And Shi would make sure that she had a memory palace that would keep her happy. She wouldn’t cut any corners with this one.

  She sat down and began to mesh the memory notes with the other files, data pulled from all over, pictures, sound clips, video files, feelies.

  She didn’t notice the lack for a little while, but the data felt incomplete somehow. Then she realized. No sign of the black-haired boy, even in later years.

  Had he died recently perhaps? But there was yesterday’s conversation. Odd.

  She called the son. He answered without picture. “Yes?”

  “I’m trying to track down the name of one of your mother’s friends. Lifelong. A man her age, his hair once black, mostly silver now, dark hair, a little goatee?”

  “She doesn’t know anyone like that,” he said with flat finality.

  “But they spoke together yesterday afternoon, for some time.”

  “Yesterday she was at my house because my sister dumped her there. She spent the afternoon staring out the window, sipping chamomile tea, and eating crackers.”

  Shi was silent for a second, trying to understand. Finally she simply said, “I must have misunderstood. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  She punched the call off and stared at the phone’s numbers. The man was too vivid to be a delusion, surely. Was the old woman truly mad? But if there was some chemical or neurological imbalance, they would have discovered that already in the medical exams.

  But she couldn’t move forward until she knew what was happening. A mad shipbrain was prone to too much chaos, too much risk. Maybe Cianna’s brain was unsuitable. She couldn’t imagine either of the children being happy about it.

  She couldn’t move forward on this before she cleared it up.

  Cianna’s children did not agree. In private conference, Ruth came so far as to skirt the edges of bribery, mentioning considerations, perks, things that might come her way if only she could see her way clear to . . . then trailed off, leaving everything else unsaid.

  “Both of you must sign off, legally,” Shi said. “Let me see what I can construct, and if she’ll adapt to it.”

  After Ruth left, she pored through the files. She resorted to the government search, the one she, strictly speaking, was not supposed to have access to. Where was he? Who was he?

  At night, staring up at the translucent ceiling tiles that showed murky moonlit clouds, she tried to fit her head around anything other than insanity. Conspiracies. Magic. Ghosts. Lost souls. Time travel. Alternate dimensions.

  Because something about Cianna was so eminently sane, at the heart of it. Her mental landscape was so clear. Being in it was like being in a hyper-real version of the world. So alive.

  How could insanity produce something like that?

  Requisitioning the brain exploration a second time was not unheard of but required special forms, part of her discretionary budget. Not something to be indulged in lightly and as a matter of fact, something that she’d always taken pride in not doing.

  Only Ruth came this time. She said to Shi, “Is this really necessary? Why can’t you just sign the forms?” Her fingers twitched their way around each other; Shi saw with a twinge of pity that she’d already gnawed through what looked like freshly grown nails, blue and purple stripes echoing her wrist-insets.

  Literally eating at herself. What will happen when Cianna is out of the mix?

  She touched mental triggers, making sure her face showed no sign of her emotions and said, selecting gentle reassurance, “Perhaps you’d like to wait in the relaxation room we have upstairs. There’s a sunlight machine and several sound sculptures. Very pretty.”

  The hands writhing,
worrying at a loose cuticle. Then heels trit-trotting away without another word.

  “She doesn’t know how to be kind to herself,” Cianna said.

  The words startled Shi. Cianna had been so silent that she’d fallen into a beginner’s trap, thinking her furniture rather than participant.

  “Who is the man, the dark-haired man?” she said.

  Cianna’s lips slackened, went quiet with an almost malicious twist.

  “Ask him.”

  Again the green quadrangle, the madrona at one end, the slope bordered by cliffs overlooking the ocean. This hadn’t appeared anywhere in Cianna’s childhood. But it seemed so real, surely it must be based in some place that was just as actual? She fumbled through neurons for the name. Port Townsend.

  This time she chose the little chapel down at one end. She couldn’t remember if it had been there last time. Surely it must have been.

  The world pressed in on her with maddening, dazzling intensity like noon sunlight at summer’s peak. When she slipped inside the white-painted doorway, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Inside, another sycamore tree. No Cianna, only the boy, the same body-age as Shi, perhaps a little older, sprawled on the green grass in shorts and blue striped shirt, his eyes closed as though he were dozing.

  Somewhere someone was mowing grass. The sharp scent bit her inner nose as she moved forward towards the boy, the blades springy under her slippers.

  He didn’t move. She stepped beside him and knelt down, meaning to touch his shoulder.

  But before she could do so, his eyes snapped open, dark and glaring at her.

  “What are you doing?”

  She stumbled back, off balance, and fell on her ass in the green, that smell almost as overpowering as the external sunshine had been. As she thought external sunshine, the sunshine here intensified to match it. Her eyes watered. The boy, a little blurry, sat up.

  “What is your name?” she said.

  “Call me Hypothetical,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe Hi for short.”

  “You’re not real,” she said. That was the only possible explanation, but he seemed so animated. So three-dimensional.

  “I’m imaginary,” he admitted. “Cianna thought it would confuse and delay things.”

  “It did,” Shi admitted. “It certainly did.” She felt some tension drop away. It was not unusual for a candidate to resist the technology, and this was one of the cleverer attempts she had ever encountered. It must have taken a tremendous feat of imagination to strew this figure through the old woman’s thoughts to the point where Shi had thought him real.

  She settled herself into the grass, enjoying the warmth of the sunlight, letting her eyelids droop. How often in her life would she get to experience something on this level? A realer than real version of a vanished age of sunlight and personal space and uncontrolled green things.

  What would someone pay for this kind of experience? Artists at this level commanded more than she’d make in a lifetime for a single performance. But her Sati rating meant she was incapable of making choices, except for that tiny part of her psyche that had been able to construct Hi.

  And Cianna’s daughter wanted her gone, wanted her off-planet.

  Better just to enjoy this while it lasted. “She gave it a good try,” she said languidly. “But now we’re over.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “You are, at any rate.”

  His hands closed around her throat.

  There were net legends about this sort of thing, even a few movies. But the truth was, if you died in someone else’s mind, you simply emerged back in real life, shuddering and gasping, to see Cianna looking at you with disappointment, eyes glittering in the dim light.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Shi said. “You said it yourself. They’ll find somewhere to put you. Let me build you a wonderful palace to live in.”

  “Rick won’t let you do it.”

  “Not there, no. But nursing facilities are expensive. And it’s similar technology, being plugged in when no one is visiting you. The ship’s computer has thousands of times the processing power, though. You have to know what a gift you have. What it could be.”

  Cianna’s face twisted, showing real emotion for the first time. “There has to be a way. A way that lets me stay real.”

  Her voice was loud and shrill and hurt Shi’s ears. This was naked emotion, unfiltered, unmuted, shocking in its exposure. In the 20th century people had hidden their flesh from exposure; in the 21st it was their minds. That was why appearance didn’t matter.

  No one wore their heart on their arm anymore—was that how the old-fashioned expression had gone?

  Shi’s overrides were going up, otherwise her heart would have been racing. This was unpleasant, so unpleasant.

  “You want to shoot me into space,” Cianna shouted. Shi could hear the rumbling of security coming, drawn by the noise. “Out into space, all alone, nothing but zombies for company!”

  “There are algorithms for randomness,” Shi said. “The people will feel real to you. As real as your creation, at least.” Her neck remembered his fingers, even though it had never felt that touch.

  Security bots in the room, columns and tentacles that paused at the sight of Cianna bound in the memory chair, screaming, swiveling to regard Shi.

  “It’s all right,” she told them.

  “It’s not!” Cianna screamed, and went on, high-pitched shrills of inarticulate rage until Shi pressed a console button and slid her into sedated silence.

  “Your mother is more than capable of being plugged into the ship and staying herself,” she told Rick. “She’ll be happier.”

  Shi had called him before talking to Ruth. She knew what Ruth would say already.

  “The law trusts you and your sibling to make the right choice for her, or you wouldn’t have been given the decision to make.”

  His head tilted from side to side, an uneasy, snakelike motion.

  “She has to agree,” he finally said.

  A third excursion was unheard of. But within reach, if she was willing to expend every iota of social capital, every scrap of influence asking fellow employees to like her project on the internal boards, swapping away vacation days and perks, even part of her vacation pay. Depleted her.

  Cost-benefit analysis allowed her to compute the odds but she had to shut off all emotions in order for the equation to make sense. Otherwise it kept inexplicably tipping, kept summoning up Cianna’s indignant face, the drawn skin translucent as bone, but the eyes still alive, still full of purpose.

  She filled herself with silent calm and re-evaluated a dispassionate formula. Yes.

  Wind from the inland this time, sighing towards her full of pine. The deer were everywhere, as they always had been, nosing through blackberry vines with black tails flicking. Every house was deserted. She found Cianna alone, standing on the cement structure at the bluff’s end: a former military embankment, the guns stripped away long ago, the cement fuzzed with emerald green moss and rusty lichen.

  She climbed up the narrow stairs. The wind hurled itself against her.

  “You don’t have to go alone,” she said. The wind slackened. Gulls hung overhead, wingtips wavering as they rode the wind. Cianna turned.

  “I’m going to branch. Make a recording of myself. It’ll go with you. Live with you in the memory palace.”

  Cianna’s nose wrinkled. “A recording.”

  Shi reached for the handrail to haul herself up the last steps and move to lean against the concrete blocks. “You know how it works. I’ll go with you. It’ll be me. It’s not cheap. I’ll have to bribe someone to slip the recording in the ship but I’ve got enough, I think.” She shrugged. “It’s in your hands. This is the best I can do. You know sooner or later Ruth will have her way.”

  And if the benefit of a lifetime, a retirement of the kind I’ve never dared dreamed of, falls my way in the process, well, who does that hurt, really?

  She continued, “I don’t mean to be cruel, but do you
want to stay here, neglected by your children? They don’t want you. I do.”

  “You have a choice. I don’t. They say I legally can’t make them.”

  “They’ll put you in the program, no matter what, yes. But if I help you—if you let me help you—you can prepare your mind, be more than just the thing that drives the ship. You’ll remember who you are.”

  The wind whipped around them and a seagull wavered in the sky, a wispy cloud flowing to obscure then reveal then hide it again. Sunlight and windchill fought for supremacy on her uncovered skin and the dazzle on the waves made tears blur in her eyes as she swallowed against the earnest lump in her throat.

  “All right,” Cianna said, finally, wearily. “Where do we start?”

  Shi woke slowly, swimming up through dream layers. She’d been so tired when she’d laid herself down to make the recording. She’d worked nonstop, night and day, to build the memory palace, to fill it with more than one had ever held before, a world of possibilities. A life that she and Cianna could inhabit.

  She looked forward to it. Her own parents had been distant. And it wouldn’t be as though they had to continually interact if they turned out not to suit each other well. The world she had made from Cianna’s imagination was her masterwork, full of details. How often did you get to build your own Paradise, almost literally?

  Now here she was, light seeping under her virtual eyelids. All around her the hyper-real, the beautiful world that would be her home for centuries . . . longer. A world of possibilities and wonder.

  She opened her eyes.

  But the tiles overhead were the same as always. She sagged back into the mattress.

  She wasn’t the recording. Only the original.