Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Yes, sorry. Forgot where I was for a second.”

  “Hmm. So soon? It’s not even the morning after yet.”

  He gave a short laugh. She began rubbing his neck. Strong fingers. He groaned and pushed himself back against the wall. Nemily pulled him forward and stuffed a pillow behind him, then straddled his lap and worked at his shoulders.

  He put the pendant back on the nightstand.

  “Is that your good luck charm?” she asked.

  “My wife.”

  She hesitated, then continued the massage. Mace felt foolish. He had long ago stopped hiding what the pendant was from people—if PolyCarb or Structural Authority had wanted it back they would have found out what it was and taken it—but here the admission seemed awkward. He wanted to let the subject drop, and it seemed Nemily would let him, but the growing silence left behind nagged at him.

  “It’s a ROM. Helen died over—well, a little over three years ago. An accident on Mars. She worked for PolyCarb, too. For certain personnel they keep persona imprints.”

  “I know. They’re hard to get hold of, though.”

  “It was a gift.” Her hands moved down onto his chest. “Mmm. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Here and there. Isn’t it a little morbid, carrying your wife’s persona around on a chain?”

  Mace’s fingers curled up involuntarily. She took her hands away an instant before he felt the tautness in himself.

  “Sorry....” she said and started to move away.

  He caught her shoulder. “No. Don’t worry about it.” She resisted slightly. He laughed self-consciously “I’m sorry. You have a point.”

  She relaxed and settled back onto his thighs. “Do you wear it all the time?”

  “No... but I don’t leave my house without it. It’s a kind of pendance.”

  She laughed. “Pendance’?”

  “I said—”

  “You said pendance.”

  “I meant penance.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s—we weren’t together when she... well “ Mace shifted uncomfortably. The dreams chittered from their corners.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to explain.” Her hands came back to his shoulders and worked at the tension.

  He concentrated on the sensations of her fingers, the stretch of pressure against his legs, the sound of her breathing, and his own response. He moved against the sheets and Nemily shifted one hand to his stomach. She scraped her fingernails lightly through the tufts of hair around his navel. His unease changed by degrees to arousal. He ran his hands along her thighs, first outside, then on top, then inside. She worked her hand beneath the sheet. He traced the outline of her hip, spread his hand across her stomach, and slipped his thumb into her hair.

  Nemily raised herself up enough to pull the sheet from his lap. She leaned close to his ear. “By the way, happy birthday.”

  In the morning, Mace opened his eyes with no disorientation; he knew where he was. Gauzy light from the open balcony filled the room. He took a deep breath: the smell of strong coffee mingled with subdued muskiness. He rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face into the pillow.

  Within the darkness behind his eyes he played for himself images of last night’s events, from the first moments of pleasure at the party to the frantic grappling with Nemily. Her smell suffused the pillow and he felt himself thicken against the sheets. Amid the recollected impressions, a single feeling was prominent by its absence. His usual evenings out ended at Everest, Aea’s finest brothel, with the ghosts, a selection of personalities augmenting a body to respond the way he wanted. He would leave hours before morning and slip home, sulking and apologetic, even though there was no one but himself to whom he might explain anything. It came closest to embarrassment. Nothing real ever happened with the ghosts, it was only physical, never a connection, so all he could keep were approximate feelings, and not even shame filled the gap where regret or fulfillment ought to be. That absence was gone, the “nothing” was missing. It would have made him laugh at its absurdity except for what seemed to be there.

  A breeze rippled the sheets around his legs. He turned onto his side and looked out the open balcony doors. Nemily stood by the railing, brushing her hair. She wore a short yellow robe; light set it aglow around her body She stepped back into the room and Mace slitted his eyes. He wanted to watch her for a few minutes, to see how she moved, what she did this early in the morning.

  She placed the brush on her table and sat down. For several seconds she stared at her reflection, but with a distracted look as if seeing something other than her own face.

  She opened a compact box. With her left hand, she pulled her hair away from the back of her neck, and with her right hand she extracted a small object from the base of her skull. For a few moments Mace stared at a dark hole at the edge of her hairline. Nemily placed the object in the box and took another one out, which she deftly inserted in the slot. Mace saw the dull white change color to match her skin the instant before she let her hair fall, once more covering her neck. She snapped the box closed.

  Mace pushed himself up on an elbow. Her eyes flickered to the mirror, across her face, then to the right and locked. Slowly, then, she turned around.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning. Is that coffee I smell?”

  Nemily nodded hesitantly Then she left the bedroom. Mace scooted up against the headboard and picked up his pendant.

  “What do we have here, Helen?” he asked in a whisper. “A ghost? Is that why she looks familiar?” He closed his fist around the pendant, suddenly self-conscious, remembering then that he had told Nemily about Helen.

  Nemily returned and set a cup on the nightstand beside him. She went back to her dressing table and sat down. She folded her arms across her breasts.

  “I guess you saw a lot.”

  Mace sipped his coffee. “Augments?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her eyes narrowed. “Some people don’t like them. They don’t care for the idea. They think they make us less human. If you’re one of those, we can part now on pleasant terms.”

  “You’re a cyberlink.”

  “Yes.”

  Mace set the cup aside and leaned forward. He wanted to ask, were you ever a ghost? did you ever work at Everest? Instead, he said, “If you don’t want to talk about it, fine. But are you going to be disappointed if I don’t leave?”

  “You don’t know me. You could learn all sorts of things about me that you don’t like.”

  “I’ve had all my vaccinations and I’m not fresh out of the nursery.” He shrugged. “What wouldn’t I like?”

  “I used to rent brain space.”

  Ah. She was a ghost. But.... “And what do you do now?”

  “I work for Hawthorne.”

  “So which do you consider a social handicap?”

  She started, blinked, and laughed, a sharp, harsh monosyllable very unlike the softer laugh Mace remembered from the previous night. She nodded and leaned back against the table.

  “Right now,” she said, “neither one.”

  The apartment was smaller than it had seemed the night before. Three rooms and a bathroom—bedroom, kitchen, and main room. Mace felt large and clumsy at the small kitchen table.

  Nemily opened the box. “The augments are all specialized,” she said. The velvet-lined interior made it look like a jewelry case. She pointed to each of the four mushroom-shaped buttons.

  “This one is mathematics, this one is sensual-aesthetics, and this one is abstract reason. Each one taps into a different area of the brain relating to those processes.”

  “Last night you wore the sensualist?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Mace tapped the fourth augment. “And that one?”

  “Recorder-collator. My journal, sort of. I don’t remember the same things from one augment to the next unless I sort it all out properly. My brain is more compartmentalized than a normal brain. The various areas that have to do with different
abilities or functions are isolated from each other. My short-term memory doesn’t download, except for a permanent spool that gives me five or six minutes of RAM after I remove an augment. Not very much. So when I finish with one I insert the recorder. It stores the memories and helps me sort of rearrange them in my head so that when I’m using my synthesist”—she tapped her neck to indicate the one now in place—”I can remember. I can’t duplicate the processes of the specialized inserts, but I have total recall of what I did.” She paused, then laughed. “Except sometimes I get in a hurry and don’t use the recorder. I’ve forgotten things for days before I used a particular augment and the recorder again. It can be embarrassing.”

  Mace understood how augments worked and this seemed unnecessarily complicated. Why, he wondered, couldn’t they have cross-wired the implant so the different functions weren’t isolated like this?

  “So memory is selective.”

  She nodded. “I’ll remember exactly what happened the last time I used that augment once I reinsert it. And the time before that and so on. Most of the memory is stored in my brain, but I need the augment to access it, to run the routine, if you know what I mean. There’s a general continuity through the recorder and synthesist, but not through the others. They’re too specialized. For instance, I have no memory of anything I did with the math augment while I’m in sensualist. I could use the synthesist all the time and get along quite well. The others are just extras.”

  “Job-related?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You’ve done secure data work.”

  “I did, on Lunase.”

  “Is that where you got the implants? Lunase?”

  When she nodded, he thought he understood the complications. The Lunessa had a reputation for a higher-than-average paranoia. If they could create a worker who might not remember what she did during her job, they would compromise the brain’s ability to process information and store memory properly. The result might be something as byzantine as this.

  “And what do they all augment?”

  Nemily’s smile vanished. “I have a permanent augment that keeps me from drooling and soiling myself.”

  Mace felt himself wince.

  She blushed slightly. “I’m sorry I—” She drew a deep breath. “I didn’t have this installed voluntarily, okay? My brain doesn’t—I’m—”

  “Hey. It’s okay. Sorry I pried.”

  “I suffered from PKU when I was a baby. The augments—I’ve had them since I was three.”

  “If you’re uncomfortable with this you don’t have to tell me anymore.”

  She nodded. “Anyway, I can also directly interface with any system that supports a standard IBM-Syntheco jack.”

  “I’m impressed.” He watched her avoid looking at him. “And flattered. Thank you.”

  She gave him an uncertain smile.

  “Will you still be disappointed if I don’t leave?” he asked.

  “No. Surprised? Yes. Disappointed...no.”

  Mace slapped a hand on the table. I’m hungry. Want to go somewhere for lunch?”

  Nemily studied him for a time, then removed her synthesist augment and replaced it with another.

  “Sensualist?” he asked.

  She nodded. Subtle changes in her features transformed her expression. A brightness entered her eyes, the same intensity Mace remembered from the party and afterward. The slight tension in her shoulders and neck changed, her posture shifting from anxiety to expectation. It was like watching her exchange herself for a different her, a putting on of a mood, an attitude, after taking another off. Mace had seen this before, at Everest, with the ghosts, but it never looked real with them. Perhaps because the fake personalities they used were just that, fake, and this, with Nemily, was real. Each of her augments, whatever changes they prompted, still left Nemily inhabiting herself.

  “No,” she said, taking his hand, Tm not hungry. Yet.”

  Six – AEA, 2118

  AFTER HE LEFT, Nemily spent the night replaying Mace. Macefield Preston, 210 centimeters; 140 kilograms; grey-dusted brown hair; eyes the indeterminate color people called hazel; large hands; long legs; a fine tracery of hair falling from his navel in both directions, expanding like a waterdrop into the pool of curls on his chest and above his penis. His skin felt papery in some places, lightly dappled with fine bumps in others, and oily smooth everywhere else, except when he sweated and the smoothness spread everywhere, obscuring all other surface distinctions.

  He seemed to like to arrange penetration so that as little else of their bodies as possible came into contact. It made for an interesting counterpoint to her own preference of pressing as much of herself as closely as she could to his body

  She resisted the temptation to edit the spool. The perfection of market-ready experiences left her uneasy afterward, even while the loops themselves seemed more than satisfactory as if with the bought event the absence of earning the pleasure subverted the desired result. Clumsy moments, awkwardnesses, minor discomforts, hesitations, and the underlying uncertainty of adequacy, combined into a kind of validation. Two bodies fumbling toward bliss lost truth in a too-refined choreography, when the dance discards the dancers.

  Her buffer interrupted after the fourth time, separating her from the impulses that drove the machinery of sensation. She opened her eyes reluctantly. Other sensations intruded: the sheets tangled around her legs, the dull ache in her neck from the angle at which her head lay, the thick odor of residual sweat and sex. She rolled over and propped herself on her elbows. A distant anxiety worked at her until she sat up, reached back, and unplugged the temporary augment. Her mind spun lazily in almost-vertigo until she inserted the synthesist augment.

  Impressions continued. Her skin felt cool from evaporating perspiration; the lights were dimmed for nightcycle; her pelvis ached like an overused muscle; her head throbbed. She glanced at the time—twenty-three—and heard herself moan.

  She stretched, discovering a score of smaller pains, then changed the sheets on the bed. Her pulse was up. She opened a drawer in her dressing table and took out the compact monitor, propped it against the mirror, then pulled a thin cable from its base. She opened her augment case and pried open the chameleon-skin surface on the recorder-collator and inserted the cable into the jack. The device ran through a self-diagnostic. When the screen gave her a nominal reading, she popped out her synthesist.

  For a few seconds her vision changed—color went flat, almost disappearing, and shadows seemed murky, detail indistinct—until she inserted the collator. With a clear transition, the world resumed its normal intensity. Nemily blinked, then touched the start icon on the monitor.

  The network of implants scattered throughout her nervous system registered on the small readouts. The main line that ran through the reticular structure, up into the branching connections to each major area, showed its rate of conductivity. Then, through that trunk, each node flared briefly as the program activated it. Her hands felt warm, then her face. A cold tingle coursed up her spine; her left knee itched.

  The anxiety over Mace disappeared for several seconds and she experienced a sudden ambivalence about him. She remembered every action, every touch, every sensation from her arrival at Piers Hawthorne’s party until Mace left at seventeen that afternoon, but they seemed like the actions of someone else, alien and peculiar. Just as suddenly, she tallied the BTUs and caloric intake for the last two days. Numbers shifted on the readouts. She felt momentarily hungry. Then the hunger seemed to move, lower down and higher up, and she remembered the last two days differently She closed her eyes and shuddered.

  She wondered sometimes what it was like to think unaugmented. The hyperawareness she experienced when plugged into one of the specialist augments gave her a feeling of power, diluted when she sorted the memories out into something like a normal experience. The truncated neuronal paths of her brain fed into synthetic pathways laid in to feed through the permanent implant and from there into the augment, where processing was
facilitated and enhanced—essentially, she wore a CPU all the time to enable her to think and comprehend. The entire thing fed back into her organic tissue to be stored in the odd way her damaged brain allowed.

  She had heard that full integration implants existed which would free her from the need to artificially sort memory, but she doubted at this stage she could be refitted.

  The entire diagnostic took two minutes. She felt mildly exhausted as she removed the recorder-collator and replaced it with the synthesist.

  Serotonin levels were slightly elevated and she noted a residue of adrenalin, but everything else was well within acceptable limits. She stored the analysis and returned the monitor to its drawer. She stripped off her shirt and went to shower.

  She sat by her terminal, toweling her hair dry, and went through her messages. Advertisements for various products, an invitation to another party, and one from the Temple of Homo Relmaginoratus. She opened it and the aged, kindly face of the local rector, Patri Simity, appeared.

  “You haven’t been to Temple since you arrived on Aea,” Patri Simity chided her gently. “It isn’t good to completely lose touch with your origins, your sources. Besides, I personally would very much like to see you. We have services every three days.”

  The message prattled on. Patri Simity had contacted Nemily shortly after she made it through InFlux. The rector had helped her find a dom, find her way around, put her in touch with potential employers. But Nemily had no intention of going to Temple ever again, though Patri Simity was a kind rector—especially compared to those Nemily had known in Lunase—and sometimes it seemed cruel to ignore her monthly invitations.

  The message ended and Nemily dumped the advertisements. She decided to answer the other invitation later.

  The next message surprised her. It was from Clare, back in Lunase. Nemily opened it, a bit dismayed at how eager she was to hear from her old roommate. Clare had been promoted twice since Nemily left. She had moved into somewhat larger quarters, though she still had trouble living within her stipend.

  “Glim is gone. Has been for, oh, nearly two years. In fact, he left shortly after you did. I’ve asked around, but no one knows what happened to him. I’m hoping I won’t ever see him again.”