Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “How long?”

  He paused in the doorway. “How long did it take you to become world-class before?”

  “Fifteen years...” Fifteen years of études and climbing his way up through the chairs of symphonies.

  “Then that's your answer.” Leonard shut the door.

  Within Julius's left hand, the old phantom hand twitched again and started playing Bach's Sonata in D minor. He clenched his hand, but the fingering did not stop.

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  * * *

  PERFECT VIOLET

  Will McIntosh

  As soon as she returned from selling the memory, Kiko opened her journal and read the last entry:

  * * * *

  When you were sixteen, you met a young man named Joseph Errat at the cinema. He was sitting behind you with a friend. He was a black man, tall and lanky. He had four neck-rings, and fiery red face-paint around his eyes. He kept leaning over and talking to you, and you were scared, and you gave one-word answers to discourage his questions. But he persisted, and finally you turned and looked at his face, and you saw such kindness there that when he asked you for your number you gave it to him. You went on a date, the first date of your life, and Joseph was funny, and bright, and looked into your eyes the whole time. He took you to dinner at The Blue Albatross, then to Low-Grav Skate. He showed you how to skate high up the walls, putting his arm around your waist to steady you, and his touch felt electric. At the end of the date he walked you to your door, kissed you once, softly, and asked to see you again. You said yes. Then he asked if he could see you a thousand more times, and you laughed, and said yes, and kissed him again and ran inside.

  Kiko read the memory four times, then closed the worn notebook and put it back on the coffee table, straightening its edge so that it was parallel with the edge of the table. She took most of the money she'd made selling the memory, put it in an envelope, and slid it under her landlord's scuffed green door. Safe for another week.

  The end of the story of her romance with Joseph was still intact, because that part was flat and brown, so it had no value. To have it removed she'd have to pay, and she could not afford to. Plus, she wanted to keep as many memories as she could. Good or bad, all were her life.

  Her father had seen Joseph kiss her at the door, and he'd forbidden Kiko from seeing Joseph again. When Joseph called and Kiko told him what her father had decided, Joseph had called her father a racist. She had defended her father; she knew he disapproved of Joseph because of the neck rings and face-paint, not his skin color. But in the end they were shouting at each other, and they never spoke again.

  Kiko sat back in her chair, exhausted. She wrapped herself in her checkered blanket, not because she was cold, but for comfort, and looked at her photos—hundreds of colored squares perfectly spaced floor-to-ceiling on one chipped and bruised wall. There was her father, standing proudly next to her at her high school graduation. There Kiko, holding her puppy, Rumor, the day her father brought Rumor home as a birthday surprise.

  She had no photos of Joseph—you don't bring a camera on a first date. If only their argument had taken place in person, she would at least have a memory of his face. Now, she had nothing, except the entry in her journal and the memory of Joseph's voice.

  Kiko retrieved the weathered black cord snaking out of the apartment's antiquated Net-Jack, plugged the spiral of faded gold prongs into the neural shunt at the base of her skull. She did a search on Joseph Errat. There wasn't much. He worked on the west side of Lower Manhattan, writing code for an industrial construction firm. No information on marital status, children, parents. No photos.

  She counted the money that was left, then put it inside her Zen book. That had been her last memory with any real value. The next time she needed money she'd be forced to sell bargain memories in bulk. Her past was already checkered with flat, static patches; she did not want to sell any more of it.

  Laughter drifted through the open window. She went over and looked out. Below her, children played in the shadowed street with a stick and a heavily taped ball. A chipped half-toilet served as home plate. Judging by the reflected light it was a sunny day. From her fifth-story apartment she could not see the sky. You had to be up at least twelve stories for that. Above her, all she could see was the underside of Upper Manhattan, a grey ceiling stretching past the tops of the crumbling buildings of Lower Manhattan in all directions. To her left, one of the tremendous pillars that supported Upper Manhattan shot upward like a stone giant, flaring at the top into huge white fingers that cupped Upper Manhattan's carbon fiber foundation. Kiko closed her eyes and pictured the dazzling glass spires, aflame with reflected sunlight, that comprised Upper Manhattan. She had never actually been up there, because she could not afford the toll. Her memory of Upper Manhattan was the only memory she'd ever bought.

  * * * *

  “Kiko! This order's been here for five or six minutes! Pick up! Pick up!” Mrs. Kim hissed, scowling fiercely.

  “Yes, ma'am.” Kiko's heart hammered. She scooped up the brown bag behind her, called “number eighty-seven,” dropped the order on the counter, returned to the line of customers waiting to order.

  She absently wiped her free hand on her pant leg, trying to get rid of the feel of grease from between her fingers, as she took the next customer's order. She glanced at the industrial clock on the concrete wall—forty more minutes and she would get a three-minute bathroom break and could wash her hands.

  The customer sat down to wait for his order, and the next customer in line stepped up.

  “Hello Kiko,” the customer, a tall black man, said.

  “Yes,” she answered, hesitantly.

  “Don't you remember me?”

  “I'm sorry, I don't.” She glanced nervously in the direction of Mrs. Kim, who was standing on a stool, digging for something in the back of a storage shelf.

  “Well, isn't that an ego-burner!” He said, grinning. “It's Joseph ... we went out once, eight or nine years ago?”

  Kiko's mouth fell open; she covered it with her hand and looked at the man in front of her. He was a handsome man, wiry, his jaw prominent. Kind eyes. No neck ring or face-paint. His hair was braided over his shoulders and nearly down to his waist. She glanced toward the back; Mrs. Kim was climbing down.

  “I'm sorry, I can't talk now. It's very nice to see you again, Joseph.” She smiled nervously. Then, realizing he had not come in to see her, she added, “May I take your order?”

  He ordered bean kung pao. As he stepped away from the counter, he said, “Can I talk to you when you get off work?”

  “I get off at 2 a.m.”

  “I'll see you then,” he said.

  * * * *

  Joseph was waiting outside, leaning against a grey metal street lamp. He straightened when he saw her, held out his hand to shake. “You haven't changed at all,” he said.

  “Neither have you,” she said. “Except no neck rings and face paint.”

  Joseph laughed, put his hand over his eyes for a moment. “Yeah, I fancied myself quite the rebel.” He sighed. There was an awkward silence; Kiko searched for something to say to fill it, but nothing came.

  “I'm curious,” Joseph said, finally. “Why did you run a search on me after all this time?”

  “How do you know that?” Kiko asked, horribly embarrassed. Of course he would be able to set alarms to alert him for searches; he wrote computer code for a living. How stupid of her.

  Joseph shrugged. He looked at her, not unkindly, waiting for an answer to his question.

  Kiko looked at the cracked pavement. “I sold the memory of our date, and I was hoping to find a picture of you to help me reconstruct it.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, that solves the mystery, doesn't it?” Six or seven scowling teens passed them. Kiko took a step closer to Joseph, who nodded to a gangly, pimply boy with a steel antenna skewering his skull. The boy grudgingly nodded back.

  “I didn't do it out of choice,” Kiko said int
o the silence after they had passed. “I needed the money.”

  Joseph nodded. “I understand. Times are tough.” He shook his head. “I read there's half a million people living in the tunnels underground,” he said.

  Kiko nodded. A siren trilled in the distance. She was not sure what else to say. “I have to get home, it's late.”

  “Do you still live with your father?” Joseph asked. Kiko's stomach twisted.

  “No, he died three years ago.”

  “I'm really sorry,” Joseph said. His eyes said he meant it, maybe in a number of different ways. “I'll walk you, if you don't mind the company.”

  They walked the half-block in silence, their footsteps echoing off the buildings. Kiko looked up at the dark ceiling, wishing there were stars overhead.

  “Can I call you?” Joseph asked when they reached her door.

  She gave him her number, smiling like an idiot.

  Inside, she scrubbed the stink of greasy food from her hands, then went to bed. When she finally fell asleep, she had a nightmare, that Joseph's appearance after nine years was only a memory she had bought.

  * * * *

  Joseph stood in her doorway holding a tiny package wrapped in glowing paper. “Hi,” he said. “This is for you.”

  She smiled hugely, unwrapped the beautiful paper a fold at a time without tearing it. Her smile dropped when she took out the memory vial. He had bought her someone else's memory, probably some hack memory-artist diving off the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge for the hundredth time, with no memory of the previous ninety-nine because he had sold them all to some memory-mill. Worst of all, once she installed it her mind would slowly incorporate it, make it her own. The hairy-knuckled hands from the original diver would become her soft, hairless hands. Over time she would not know for sure if she had bought the memory or jumped off the bridge herself. Memories were slippery. They drifted. Kiko wanted nothing to do with other people's memories.

  “Oh,” she fumbled, “that's very thoughtful of you.” She carried it to her table and put it down next to her journal, then grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.

  “Don't you want to see what it is?”

  She hesitated, unsure of what to say. After a few false starts, she said “It's very nice of you to bring me a gift, but I don't care for other people's memories. There was no way you could have known that. I'm sorry to be ungracious.”

  Joseph smiled. “Come on, trust me!” He held his hands out in supplication. “Tell you what, if you don't like it I'll pay to have it removed.”

  Reluctantly, Kiko retrieved the memory. It would be terribly rude to refuse the gift twice; she really had no choice.

  “Look at the color,” Joseph said. She held the vial up to the light. It was bright, clear violet, indicating it was a happy memory, and very vivid. The numbers etched on one end of the vial would indicate the exact valence, vividness, and size of the memory, but Kiko did not care to look. She thought the way people fussed over the tone and purity of memories just made the whole thing more sordid, but she pasted a false smile on her face and acted as if she were impressed.

  She centered the flat end of the vial on her neural shunt and pressed. A moment of disorientation, then in her mind's eye she saw a younger version of herself sitting in a movie theater; laughing in a restaurant; skating unsteadily up a wall; parting her lips slightly to be kissed at the door of her father's house. Along with the visual memory, Kiko was shocked by the charge of emotion that rushed into her. She felt Joseph's thrill at being with her, his hope that she liked him, the butterflies he felt when she smiled. Through his eyes, she was so beautiful. It was overwhelming to feel it all firsthand, having the truth of Joseph's very own memory. She was seeing into Joseph's soul, and what she saw was that he had loved her.

  She threw her arms around him and burst into tears. Each time she tried to talk, to tell Joseph that it was the most wonderful gift she had ever gotten, better even than her puppy, Rumor, nothing came out but sobs.

  “Tell me all about our date,” he whispered. “I want to remember it.”

  * * * *

  Kiko thought of the time she had played with her cousin in the park, who had been visiting from Philadelphia. “Describe” was flashing on the screen in front of her. “My cousin visits, and we play hidden-disk in the park on a beautiful summer day,” she whispered, not wanting others in the boutique to overhear. The screen now flashed “Isolate.” She held the memory in her mind, and pressed the yellow “retrieve” button on the console. A gentle hum, and the memory was gone. She glanced down at the notebook in her lap to see what the memory had been.

  A vial popped through a round hole above the console and slid down the wire ramp until it bumped up against the last in a long line of vials. Kiko leaned over to check the color of the vial. Red.

  She closed her eyes, scanned for more happy memories. Think Kiko chided herself, there must be more. A woman was talking noisily with the boutique's owner, and it cut right through the walls of the booth and made it hard for Kiko to concentrate. Good memories. Think. She realized she should have made up a list before she came. She'd never sold memories in bulk before, so it hadn't occurred to her.

  She scanned the forty vials already lined up. Only two were labeled in the violet range, and both were murky, indicating they were pallid. They must have been old memories, worn out like old photos. She checked her notes, which she would transfer to her memory journal when she got home—yes, one was her first day of school, the other feeding ducks by hand in Central Park. The rest of the vials had tested at various hues of red, except for one that was not even red, but light brown. She consulted her notes. That was a time she and her father had gone to the museum together. Brown hues were hard to sell, unless they were very dark, very vivid. Sick memories for thrill seekers. She would take this one home and reinstall it.

  Think. The problem was, she did not remember much of her early childhood. For the most part her memories began when she was nine or ten. She knew from reading that all her memories were there—memories never disappeared once they formed, they only got lost, or were sold. Her early memories must be terribly lost. Early childhood, Kiko thought, closing her eyes. Picture your room, what games did you play? What was on the walls?

  An image of a hammer flashed in her mind, one end hooked with long steel fangs. I'm going to ... What was it? The memory skated just out of reach. She tried to dig it out, though the knot in her stomach told her it would not be one she could sell. Still, it was her life, and she wanted to know.

  The memory popped loose and washed over her in a sickening wave. She had done something wrong—gotten in trouble at school, that was it. When she came home her father was sitting in the kitchen, dabbing sweat from his face with a white handkerchief. He had stood, opened a drawer, and taken out a thick butcher knife, saying, with icy calm in his voice, “I'm going to kill you, then I'm going to kill myself.” She had run to her room and locked the door. He had pounded on the door with his fists. Then silence, and she'd thought it was over. Then, a deafening bang that made her cry out, followed by another, and another. He had pounded on the door with the flat end of a hammer, then turned it and hit it with the claw end until the wood split with an awful crunch. The knife was gone. Instead he had beaten her with a wire hanger ripped from her closet.

  She'd been wrong, she probably could sell that memory. But she would not allow some twisted pervert to get pleasure from it.

  With shaking hands Kiko disconnected the feed from her neural shunt, collected the vials, and put them in the basket provided by the boutique. These would have to do. She had no good memories left, except for the new ones with Joseph, and she would never sell those. The rest of her good memories were gone.

  “Do you have any marriages?” the loud woman was saying as Kiko made her way through neatly-lined shelves of vials categorized into sections—action, family, adults only, crime, and so on. Bargain-bin stuff. The valuable ones were displayed behind the counter—row upon row of dazz
ling violet, except for a few at the top as brown as raw sewage.

  “No marriages, no,” the owner said to the woman, who wore a white hat that came to a point beyond her forehead like a ship's prow. She was in her fifties, tall and puffy. Her clothes screamed Upper Manhattan. Down here to devour the few joys people were able to eke out, like an enormous hog.

  “How about a divorce?” the owner suggested. “I've got a real shocker, a woman whose husband drops it on her like a bomb!”

  The woman scowled. “I'm not interested in that sort of thing. That's sick.”

  “Okay,” the owner said, shrugging. He turned to look at his stock. “How about an engagement?” he said, retrieving a vial from the wall, “valence of 90.1, vividness 68.6? Not bad. Hard to find engagements, harder than weddings even.”

  “Hmm. Call up the description.” The owner popped the vial into the reader, spun it around so the woman could read the text of the original owner's description. The woman nodded. “I'll take it, along with those other two.”

  The owner rang them up. Kiko was astonished by the price—enough to pay her rent for two years. The markup was enormous. She wondered if it was really true what they said, that memories could be extracted and transferred, but not copied, that no one could isolate the spark that gave them life in the mind. Maybe the truth was that they were simply more valuable if they were unique.

  The boutique owner tallied Kiko's memories, commenting that it was ‘pretty good stuff,’ clearly all original-owner memories judging by the clarity scores.

  Outside, she saw the woman, smiling widely, her eyes unfocused. She muttered something in a girlish voice, then giggled, put her hand on her cheek. “Yes, yes,” she trilled excitedly, and headed off down the street, in the direction of the lift to Upper Manhattan.

  Exhausted, Kiko headed home. Her rent was five days late. Mrs. Kim had not paid her in three weeks, saying things were bad, but would get better soon. Kiko was afraid Mrs. Kim was not going to pay her any more, was just getting as much free work out of her as she could.