The Unhappening of Genesis Lee

by Shallee McArthur

  I pulled off one of my gloves with shaking hands, exposing my skin to Jackson. He was Dad’s best friend. Knowing him—him knowing me—ratcheted up the fear factor. He would see me drunk and ridiculous through my own eyes. Feel my panic and anger. No one should be able to judge someone else from inside their own head.

  “I’ll be quick,” he said. “I’ll barely notice the rest of your memories. Think of the one you want to share.”

  Cora was my best friend. I’d do anything for her. Even this. Every muscle curled in on itself as I held the entire remembrance of the night in my mind.

  For the first time since I was a kid, smooth and terrifying skin warmed my forearm. A rush of new memories—his memories—connected through the nerves in our skin. The outline of his life blossomed at the edge of my consciousness. My soul strained under the weight of extra years and sorrow.

  He could see my life too. All of me, exposed like I’d been stripped naked. What would he think of me, seeing me as I saw myself?

  The crush of his memories lifted. My eyes flew open. I hadn’t realized I’d closed them. He placed his finger on the quartz stone of the SLS, storing his memory of my memory. The cover snapped back into place.

  He would take the SLS to the station and plug it into the system. My memory would travel through specialized metal wires, every trace of me stripped away, pared down to the nitty-gritty details. Software would change the memory into ­programmable—and searchable—data. Any detective could re-experience it. Only it wasn’t an experience anymore, just data to be filed with fingerprints and swabs of spit. Practically not a memory at all.

  I clutched my ungloved hand to my chest.

  Mementi crime investigation was among the best in the world. Also among the most brutal.

  “Thanks, Gen.” Jackson packed the SLS into his bag with slow movements. Like if he moved at his more confident pace, he would shatter the frozen world. “It’s all confidential, so don’t worry about any—ah—reprisals.”

  Meaning from my parents. Too late for that. There’d been no way to hide that I’d snuck to the Low-G with Cora.

  “Even I don’t remember a thing, I promise,” Jackson said. “It’s all in the machine for others to review.”

  Well. Now I felt loads better. I pulled my glove on.

  Cora stood up. “Are you done?”

  “Yes,” he said, kindly ignoring her tone. “I’m sorry I had to ask so many questions. Most of the attack must have happened in an unmonitored area, but we have some distant streetcam footage. You were running from an unidentified person. We’ll see if we can find out why you only had a single Link stolen. Gena’s memory will be a huge help. But I can’t guarantee anything. It’s a complicated case.”

  Cora scowled at Jackson. “Whatever. You can leave now. I’m sure you need to process your evidence.”

  I bit back an apology to Jackson on her behalf.

  “Someone from the hospital will contact your parents today,” he said. “You didn’t lose as much as the other victims, but they’ll want to monitor you for . . . side effects.”

  Cora stared at the carpet as if she could find her lost memories buried in the shag.

  “What kind of side effects?” I asked, worried. I hadn’t heard why the other victims needed medical attention, but I could guess. A lifetime of no memories. That’d screw you right up. “She won’t have to be hospitalized like the others, will she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His voice dripped with uncertainty—Jackson, who was also so sure of himself. What would happen to Cora if she didn’t get her memories back?

  “Has Ascalon been doing anything to help?” I demanded.

  Dad would know better than Jackson. He’d worked for Ascalon BioTech for years. They’d been the ones to create the SLS. Even ­restrained by the law against human research, Ascalon always had the answers when it came to our unique memories.

  Cora leaned forward eagerly. “The memory backups! I ­remember, Ascalon was working on those! Do they have . . . anything new?”

  She wouldn’t know. Anything could’ve happened in the last two years, for all she knew. We could have finally come up with a machine that copied memories, instead of having to use a human intermediary. My throat closed, and I was grateful, ­because I didn’t have to be the one to murder her hope.

  Jackson ran a hand over his thick, black hair. Slow and careful. “Ascalon BioTech has been making progress on memory backups for years. But no. The SLS is still the strongest memory tech they’ve come up with.”

  Cora’s eyes darted to mine. She looked terrified. Desperate. “There’s always . . . there’s always memory sharing. If someone let me see their version of the last two years . . .”

  I dug my fingers into my palms so hard, every joint throbbed. No way did she want me to do that for her. Did she?

  And I had to wonder—how far would I go for Cora, if she asked me?

  “You know that’s not an option, Cora,” Jackson said gently.

  Doctors had tried memory sharing as therapy fifty years ago, with Aria Matthews. She went a little nuts, destroyed some of her memories, then wanted them back. Friends and family shared memories with her, thinking her brain could reorient the perspective. Make the memories hers again. But their memories were their memories, tainting her with their realities. When her brain had tried to merge memories that held other people’s identities, Aria had too many realities in one head. So she blew that one off.

  It had been banned as a medical option at the same time as the prohibition of direct study of Mementi memories and Links.

  Some people—like my mom—still let close friends or family observe their memories. Mom was so proper and polite, you’d never guess she’d allow the world’s most massive privacy invasion. I secretly thought she only did it because she was too stiff to know how to show affection any other way.

  Observing was one thing—as bad as sharing a memory—but you never stored someone else’s memories in your own Links. It took a conscious effort not to automatically form your own memory while observing someone else’s. You could, though. Had to, if you didn’t want someone else in your head. Or to land in jail, in the very unlikely event you were caught with someone else’s memories in your Links.

  Jackson turned to go, but paused. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Sure you are,” Cora muttered as he left. “I’m sure you’re sorry you had to rape Gena’s memory too.”

  The words punched me in the stomach. It wasn’t. It wasn’t like that. Not for me, not when I’d offered the memory. But I wanted to vomit, and I didn’t know how Cora could even speak or breathe or move. She hadn’t been willing.

  “It’s not his fault,” I whispered. “I said I would. If it helps. He said it could help find your Link.”

  “He practically forced you into it.”

  She threw herself in the chair next to the window. I waited for the theatrical gestures, for threats of violence she’d never actually commit, for the typical Cora dramatics. I needed them. I couldn’t release if Cora didn’t.

  They didn’t come. The stillness wound tighter, ready to snap.

  Her face twisted. “How can this be happening?”

  The Links in her hair caught the bright sun coming through the windows. A kaleidoscope of colors shimmered on the wall.

  Three long bracelets—my own Links—wound up my forearm like snakes. Cora had given them to me for my tenth birthday. She’d even strung the beads herself, using just wood and metal. The magnetized metal Links locked the strands together without a clasp. She’d even picked my favorite colors. Red, blue, and green.

  Cora liked her own Links to be as many colors as possible so they would match whatever she wore. Which color was missing? It didn’t matter, I guess. But even the color was part of Cora.

  “I could hardly tell the memories were gone at first,” she said, her voice hoarse with tears she wasn’t crying. “I just woke up and thought it was two years ago.”

/>   Two years. Two years was so long. And she hadn’t even known. I tasted blood, and realized I’d chewed a tiny hole into my lip. If you couldn’t remember that you’d forgotten, how would you know how horrible it was to forget?

  She stood and began pacing. “But there’s also this . . . disconnected feeling. I didn’t even know what it meant until I went to brush my teeth and my toothbrush was orange and I didn’t ­remember getting an orange toothbrush.” She laughed, a little wild. “My toothbrush. Can you believe it? My toothbrush was the first time in my life I ever thought the words I don’t remember.”

  Her pacing was a small relief from the motionless world. I took tiny breaths and waited for her to go on.

  “I can feel where they should be.” She trailed her fingers down her neck to her chest, like she was searching for a physical hole. “All the days I lost. I can feel things in me that have changed, but I don’t understand them. I don’t remember who I am.”

  “What do you remember?” I was almost afraid to ask. “From last night, I mean. How’d you get home?”

  “I remember walking up the front steps and going right to bed. I was so tired, and I felt funny, like I’d been drinking. I thought I’d come from Dom’s end-of-school party. We were sophomores.”

  The night he’d first acted interested in Cora. So she remembered nothing of their relationship. Last night, I’d have said that would be a good thing. But good or bad, memories of Dom were part of her. Except now they weren’t. I struggled to find what to say next.

  “At least you didn’t lose everything.” Not much of a silver ­lining, there. “I mean, one of the victims is Mrs. Jacobs—you know, Blaire’s mom, my sister Ren’s best friend? And she had all of her Links stolen.”

  “I remember your sister, Gena, and I remember Blaire and her mom,” Cora snapped. “And the fact that I didn’t lose everything is not exactly comforting.”

  We fell silent. What now, after all the preliminary how-could-this-happens? She wasn’t the Cora from yesterday, she was the Cora from two years ago. Except she wasn’t even that. Invisible cracks split the frozen air between us. A chasm of two years I didn’t know how to breach. I missed her already.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, finally standing still. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry too.”

  She tugged a strand of hair. “How can I feel sad about losing something when I don’t know what I’ve lost?”

  I wanted to curl into a ball on my chair. “I wish I could do something.”

  “You can’t.”

  Two words that drove me from aching to agony.

  She didn’t have the memory she’d told me of just last night, of holding Dom’s hand through thin gloves—her first touch. She didn’t have our game of truth or dare where she’d swallowed a goldfish whole. Or her amazing dance performance last summer when she finally decided she wanted to be a choreographer. Everything that had happened to her in the last two years had unhappened.

  I nudged her shoe with mine, our best-friends signal we were there for each other. She didn’t nudge back. She picked up a rectangle of paper from the end table next to me. Real paper, not micropaper. I loved that she wrote down her songs. She said it made them more real.

  “I don’t remember writing this,” she said.

  She lowered the paper, covered in her flowing handwriting. My eyes lingered on the last line. Not even a complete phrase.

  “I don’t know how I was going to finish it,” she said. “The words don’t mean anything to me.”

  A storm built inside her. I saw it in the tension of her shoulders and the shaking of the paper in her fingers. The stillness was about to shatter. I almost welcomed the impending relief of a moving world.

  “Cora—”

  “No!” She screamed, like a sudden blast of thunder. “Don’t you dare tell me it’ll be alright, or that I’ll find myself again, or any other crap! I’m broken. I’ll never be the person I was going to be without those memories. Even if I can make myself into someone else, it’s not fair that I didn’t get to choose that!”

  She crumpled the paper and threw it at me. I couldn’t squeak out a single word from my swollen throat. Because she was right, and my heart crumpled like the paper she had thrown.

  Cora sank to the floor, sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”

  I reached toward her, helpless. “Shh.”

  The world jump-started into motion as her parents rushed in. Mrs. Webber dropped to her knees next to Cora. Her dad hovered on her other side. Air flowed again, alive and breathable.

  “What is it, baby, what happened?” Cora’s mom wrapped an arm around her shoulder, careful to only touch clothing.

  Cora usually had a dramatic kind of sad, full of flowery words and wails of agony over ice cream—but these sobs. She gasped them up from some deep well inside her that hadn’t existed before.

  Her father hung back. He and Cora hadn’t had a great relationship since her parents divorced five years ago. Things had only gotten better between them in the last year. A year she’d forgotten.

  Mrs. Webber turned tear-filled eyes to her ex-husband, and he stepped forward. He touched a trembling gloved hand to ­Cora’s shoulder. They stood in the sunlight that streamed into the room, touching lightly, hesitantly. The only way Mementi families touched. If they touched at all.

  The last time one of my parents had touched me, I was five years old. My mother put her gloved hands to my back to send my swing soaring. I’d learned to swing by myself that day, the final hurdle of growing up. I could dress myself, bathe myself, swing myself. She’d thought I didn’t need her after that.

  “I’ll go,” I whispered to Cora’s family.

  Mrs. Webber forced a smile. “Thank you.”

  Four words were all we could manage between us.

  Outside, shadows shifted as palm trees swayed in the breeze. I swayed with them as I walked, almost drunk on the dance of a world rolling forward. The midday sun shone on the distant red cliffs of Havendale Canyon. I should have been on my way there for my weekly internship at the Observatory, but I couldn’t drum up the usual excitement. They’d understand if I didn’t show today.

  I could have gone home. Except Mom would be there, and she wasn’t exactly happy with me after finding out about last night. I hadn’t technically been forbidden to go out, but I had been very technically forbidden to go to the Low-G. And the drinking was a big issue, even though it was completely not my fault. I’d retained the privilege of “supporting” Cora despite my three-month ­grounding sentence, and it was sort of shocking that’s all I’d been slammed with. Dad’s grief at such betrayal from his perfect daughter had nearly prompted him to drive me to jail for my underage drinking. Because that was so much more important than the fact that I’d barely escaped an attack from the Link thief.

  I stopped in the street. A dry water fountain sat in front of a dark green, gothic-style house. Complete with turrets, arched windows, and secret passages. It was empty now. Blaire, my sister’s best friend, had moved out, and her mother had been in the hospital since her Link theft.

  The parched fountain squatted ominously in a bed of dead flowers. A reminder. The Link thief was back, and he’d struck closer to home than ever.

  Anyone could be next.

  3

  Does my old friend remember me?

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXIV

  I wanted to hop right back off the tram two seconds after the doors hissed shut behind me. The chill in the air wasn’t just the air-conditioning. Like the dance floors at the Low-G last night, the tram was divided. Populace at the front of the car, Mementi at the back. Stiff bodies and silent glowers held enough potential energy to spontaneously combust the whole tram car.

  The tram pulled forward. Every person, Populace and ­Mementi, stared at me. Waiting to see what this unknown element would do.

  This unknown element was going to park her rear end right where it was safest. I
sat next to Mrs. Harward and her youngest daughter Talise. Tendrils of anxiety tickled my stomach. Maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea to head to my sanctuary in Havendale Canyon. It was a long tram ride, and my untrustworthy emotions were already shot after the morning with Cora and Detective Jackson.

  Politeness dictated I greet the people next to me, but what would I say? Hey there. Looks like everyone’s ready to bite each other’s heads off. Nice weather we’re having, too. Mrs. Harward took the decision out of my hands.

  “Good afternoon, Genesis.” Forced cheerfulness oozed from the greeting.

  “Hello, Mrs. Harward.” I turned to her.

  Oh. Oh wow.

  Her face didn’t match my memory from the Christmas party at the Arts Center, the last time I’d seen her. The wrinkles around her eyes were gone, and the way her cheeks shifted when she talked had changed. Her skin looked tighter. Younger.

  She gave a tiny smile at my reaction. “That much of a change?”

  “I . . . suppose.”

  Her eyes drifted to the Populace, then darted to her daughter. Last time I checked, the Populace hadn’t developed telepathic murder, but she hovered like the girl could keel over at any second. Tense muscles quivered beneath her mask of calm.

  She spoke again, her voice pitched a bit higher than normal. “The people at the spa say you lose ten years in the space of five minutes with this treatment.”

  “So Ascalon finally released the new Chameleon injections to the public?” I could play along with her attempt to act pleasant and natural.

  “Yes. What do you think, ten years gone?” She rubbed her pale cheek.

  Mrs. Harward was only in her late thirties, not an old hag. The new smoothness in her features looked unnatural. Almost waxy.

  “Ten years for sure,” I said. “You look amazing.”

  The lie flowed easily. Truth was unnecessary when painful. Mementi politeness wasn’t just a way of life, it was a means for survival. A way to stay positive—or at least neutral—in each other’s memories. I didn’t want to exist inside anyone’s Links as being cruel.