Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  “You want to take my memories,” Roger said. “And give them to some other man. My personal memories, of you. And you don’t see how that’s messed up?”

  “I see that you threw me aside, and now you don’t want to give me the one thing that will let me have closure,” Mary said. “You’re probably already dating someone else. Aren’t you?” Roger’s squirming was confirmation enough.

  Guilt won. Roger went to the clinic, which was a glorified kiosk just outside the mall that smelled of ozone, and Mary watched the whole time as the neural sensors danced around the three-dimensional map of Roger’s mind, plucking out the specific bits of his past that related to the two of them getting together. She tried to imagine what the machine was getting. Their first meeting at the Bankrupt Daisies concert, their first proper date when it rained and Roger held his jacket over her head, that time they bonded over both hating Jane Austen, the whole weekend they spent naked, his dad’s funeral. It was all becoming a blur to her, but those months would be preserved. Pristine.

  At the end, Roger looked exhausted, under the weather. “I have to go lie down,” he said. He handed her a sparkly memory wisp, a silver feather floating in a plexiglas cube. She thanked him several times and even kissed his cheek. The cube fit in her purse, next to her mycosnuff and breathspray. She imagined implanting those memories into hundreds of men, thousands even, so they could all remember falling in love with her. And then that thought scared her with its brazenness, so she banished it. She thanked Roger again, and he said it was nothing.

  • • •

  “Oh my god, can I see it?” Stacia stretched out an elegantly manicured hand. Mary only left her hanging for a moment before plunking down the cube containing her happy early months with Roger. “Wow,” Stacia said, “it’s so light. It weighs almost nothing. It’s Moore’s Law in action, right?”

  “I guess so,” Mary said. “Moore’s Law, yeah. Everything gets smaller and smaller, forever.”

  Stacia was staring at the little wisp inside the cube, watching it undulate. Mary realized this had been going on for an uncomfortably long time. “It’s so pretty,” Stacia said.

  “Yeah,” Mary said. She reached out to take the cube back, but Stacia moved out of reach with a dancer’s grace, so that she didn’t quite seem to be dodging.

  They were at the mall, which was a program that lasted approximately forty-five minutes depending on your attention span. With the right lenses inserted and enough smart cookie in your system, you could look at a dozen storefronts per minute, scrolling around you in the spherical chamber with a walkway at its center. Over Mary and Stacia’s heads, palm trees slowly morphed into “futuristic” metal cranes (as in the bird). This mall had gone way downhill.

  Stacia and Mary had originally met when they’d escaped from the same dismal party together in sophomore year of college, where they were the only two smeary-eyed malcontents dressed in black, in a galaxy of pink hoopskirts. They’d formed a club: The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick. Mary was an aspiring bio-artist, culturing abstract oozes, while Stacia was a shy pudgy computer-grower, but they shared a deep conviction that ninety-nine percent of everything people cared about was false and revolting, like the fake barf on sale at the magic store in this mall.

  They almost went into a hat store that was selling fancy retro bonnets, but then they decided they were bored with hats. “Let’s skip to the food court,” Stacia said. “Wafflecrepes. I’m buying.”

  “Can I have my cube back?” Mary didn’t want to sound pushy or needy, or as though she didn’t trust Stacia. The memory wisp flickered as it caught the sparkly light from the kitchenwares store. One of the clerks in the store waved, trying to get their attention with a fancy spatula, then was gone.

  “I was wondering if I could maybe borrow it,” Stacia said. “Just for a day or two.” She bit her lip and pulled her shoulders inwards, towards her cleavage in her frilly chemise. “Because I would kind of like to … to copy it.”

  “You what?” Mary thought she must have misheard over the mall’s schmaltzy orchestral music. “You want to make a backup or something?”

  “No, no, I want it in my head.” Stacia laughed—but it was a nervous, defensive laugh, for a change. “I want to have Roger’s memories in my head. I want those experiences, I want to remember them, like they happened to me. I want to feel what it was like for him. Firsthand.”

  Mary found herself backing away from Stacia a bit, until she was almost inside the make-your-own-stuffed-animal store. The mall stopped changing, in response to her proximity to an entrance.

  “I never knew … ” Mary’s mind raced, almost as if she’d had a smart-cookie overdose. She felt her heart clapping. “I never knew you felt that way about me. All this time, we’ve been best friends. Nearly ten years now, I never knew you were … you were in love with me.” She made herself stop shrinking away, and come back into Stacia’s orbit.

  “Oh Jesus, no.” Stacia laughed, her normal laugh this time. “Is that what you think? My god, no. I’m as straight as they come, you know that. No lesbian inclinations at all. Jesus. I’m sorry to let you down, I love you as a friend. No, I just want to have the memories. I want to know what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like?”

  “All of it. Falling in love. The start of a long-term relationship. Being a man and falling for a beautiful woman. All of it. I just want to have those experiences in the mix, jumbled up with my real memories. I think it could solve a lot of stuff for me.”

  “But … but why Roger and me? Why can’t you just find some random stranger and get his memories? I bet you could buy something on the gray market. Or just ask around. Like you said, everybody’s starting to do this.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same. And just think—this will bring us closer together. Any questions you have about Roger, or about the mistakes you make at the start of a relationship, you can just ask me. It’ll be great!”

  “Uh … ” Mary had moved far enough away from the door to the teddy-bear store that it had vanished, and now other stores were whipping behind her. She had a dreadful headache, the kind that started at the top of her scalp and traveled all the way down her spine to her sacrum. She could barely see.

  “It doesn’t take long. I’ll give it right back to you in a day or so, I promise.”

  “No. Please, no,” Mary said. “Please, just give it back to me now.” She was starting to have a nagging suspicion that this had been Stacia’s plan all along, and the real reason Stacia had been so insistent that she ask Roger for this. “Just, please, give it back.”

  Stacia nodded. “Okay, that’s how it has to be.” She raised up her hand with the cube in it, as if to hand it back to Mary—and then she turned and ran inside a kina kuniya store, disappearing into its maze of shelves and running out the back exit before Mary could even get her bearings.

  Mary was left hyperventilating in a null zone between the mall and the real world, where everything was a whirl of broken advertising images, too fast to make out even with smart cookies.

  • • •

  Mary kept trying to contact Stacia, who had gone off the grid. This was the longest Mary and Stacia had gone without speaking to each other in the past decade. Mary was so freaked out she could barely breathe, imagining Stacia absorbing all the memories of her private moments with Roger, the good times. Making them into a big joke in her head, or worse yet getting ironically sentimental over them. Mary couldn’t sleep or concentrate on anything; she almost let a bad batch through at work.

  Stacia waited a few days before bringing the memory wisp back to Mary—the exact amount of time it would take for the memories to become permanent in Stacia’s brain. Then at last, she arranged a meet in a hotel lobby downtown.

  Right away, there was something different about Stacia’s body language, a little more of Roger’s old calculated slouch and less of the thrown-back shoulders. Like she’d absorbed a bit of Roger’s personality along with a dose of his memories. Probably
that would get submerged over time, but it still startled her when Stacia did that thing with her lower lip that Roger used to do.

  “Hey, looking good, babe,” Stacia said. “You’re wearing that belt that I got—I mean, that he got you.” Mary had forgotten that Roger bought her this fake alligator belt.

  “I can’t believe you went through with this,” Mary said.

  Stacia handed the cube back to Mary. “I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “I know, it was an invasion of privacy, and a terrible thing to do. You know ever since we got out of college I’ve been dating, right? And I’ve made a point of never getting with anyone for more than a few weeks at a stretch. I’m like the world expert at making things happen, but then the juice goes out of them and I get bored and move on. I was realizing that maybe if I knew what was going through a guy’s head when he’s falling for someone, maybe I wouldn’t have to … I don’t know. But I was hanging around Roger the whole time you were with him, he’s the only guy I was always spending time with these past several years, and I realized I never understood him at all.”

  Mary had snatched the cube back and stuck it in the deepest crevice of her purse, with two zippers protecting it. Barn door, horse. “I thought that after Roger, the breakup, that nobody could ever hurt me that much again,” she mumbled. “I guess I was pretty dumb. Right? This is way worse. I’m going to have your knife in my back forever.” They were standing in this hotel lobby, surrounded by travelers and people having bar meetings, at noon, having what ought to be a nighttime bar conversation.

  “Don’t be like that, babe,” Stacia said. Roger used to call Mary “babe” when they were first dating. He’d stopped a few years in, and that hadn’t seemed significant at the time. “It’s just that memory is one of the main building blocks of identity. And you know, right around the time that you started seeing Roger was when I started to become the person I am now. I wasn’t seeing as much of you at the time, and I felt totally alone. And maybe I don’t like the person I turned into. I just want to remember that time in my life a different way.”

  “Now you’re blaming me for your choices?” Mary said. “Like it’s my fault that you started having intimacy issues, because I was in a long-term relationship and you weren’t? Are you even listening to yourself?”

  “It’s not about blame, babe,” Stacia said. “I’m just trying to get a different perspective on that time in our lives.”

  “Stop calling me babe!” Mary didn’t even care anymore that she was yelling in a public place. A group of people with lanyards and fancy shirts glanced in their direction. “Just, please, stop.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Stacia didn’t know how to hold herself, what sort of body language to adopt with Mary. “I keep thinking about that nightmare you had two months after you starting dating Roger, the one about an ocean of pure acid washing over everything and melting all the people and buildings. Once you would have told me about that dream, but you told Roger, and he held you so tight he thought he could almost smush you. It was right after his father had just died. He felt so full of grief and protectiveness, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He thought his heart would just give out, pop or something.” Stacia leaned on the back of an armchair. “Then I called, wanting to see if you were up for brunch, and he suddenly just felt annoyed and jealous.”

  Then Stacia walked away, doing some weird mixture of her sashay and Roger’s stride.

  • • •

  So now Mary had to avoid all the places she’d ever gone with Roger, plus every place she used to hang out with Stacia. All her other friends kept asking her if she was okay, because they heard there was weirdness with Stacia, but Mary did not feel like explaining. And Stacia kept sending message after message, until Mary blocked her. She started going to the motherboard garden after work, because she’d never gone there before, and watching the tiny motherboards making abstract shapes in the carbon nanofiber beds calmed her.

  One day, Mary was sitting in the motherboard garden, trying to stop replaying in her head the story of Roger, Stacia, and their patsy. And she noticed a man over at the other end of the square—at first, he just seemed overcome with emotion at the zen-like simplicity of the place. But then she’d noticed a tremor on one corner of his mouth and some vessels bursting in the opposite eye, and Mary recognized the signs of someone who’d done the wrong combination of neurotransmitters, from when she used to experiment at school. She rushed to his side just as he started to keel over, and kina-ed an ambulance. She rode to the hospital with him, telling the paramedics what counter-toxins he probably needed.

  Mary figured she would never hear from that guy, whose name was Dave, again. Most guys would rather forget that they showed weakness in front of a total stranger, right? But Dave got in touch a few days later and asked her out for jerk chicken and plantains.

  Dave wasn’t the opposite of Roger or anything—Mary had to resign herself to accepting that she had a Type—but he was shorter and burlier than Roger, with darker skin and a thicker mustache. He worked as an estate planner, in a fancy office in the donut hole downtown, and he was maybe a touch more reserved than Roger. He never made her laugh the way Roger had, but he made her smile.

  Mary waited until their fourth date, when she and Dave were already spending a whole weekend together, before telling him about Roger’s memory wisp. “It’s kind of dumb,” she said. “But I figured I ought to mention it, in case you wanted to. I mean, it would be one way to streamline things. You know. You could figure out sooner if you actually want to be in a relationship with me.”

  “I’m already in a relationship with you,” Dave said, and she shivered all over, even though they were in a hot tub (naked) together. His ample chest hair glimmered.

  “In that case, I’m in a relationship with you as well,” Mary said, leaning upwards and kissing him, while their feet nuzzled.

  “You know, I think getting to know each other is the fun part,” Dave said, stretching out in the tub. “The newness, the thrill of discovery. Peeling back the layers. Getting to know someone can be delightful. If it’s the right person.”

  Mary nodded. She hadn’t even thought of any of this as something that could be fun. She had been thinking of starting a relationship as like defusing a bomb, or cooking a complicated recipe. “Yeah. Let’s hear it for the slow way.” She raised an invisible glass out of the water, and chinked it with an imaginary glass in Dave’s hand.

  “The slow way.” Dave toasted back.

  Around the time Mary shoved the memory cube into the trash compactor of the “kitchen” rectangle of her studio apartment, listening to the satisfying crunch of data being fatally compromised, she realized it had been almost two months since she’d spoken to Stacia. Time was, they used to talk almost every day. She had a moment of slow bereavement, like the soil erosion after an old-growth tree is uprooted. She had to bite back the urge to kina Stacia and try to salvage something.

  Of course, as soon as Mary destroyed the memory wisp, she regretted it, because the day might come, years from now, when she would desperately need concrete evidence that she had once been loved. That someone could fall in love with her. She had Dave now, and she was currently experiencing the sensation of falling in requited love—but she’d already seen how that turned out. Right?

  • • •

  Mary went dancing with Dave at that new club that was five dayglo rooms with imperfect soundproofing, so the beats bled from dance floor to dance floor, and she was whooping at the unpredictability of the rhythms and the proximity of Dave’s wide torso, when she looked over Dave’s shoulder and saw Stacia swaying towards them with a desperate grin on her face.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she breathed in Dave’s ear. She hadn’t told Dave about what Stacia had done, because Mary felt like it was her fault in some way.

  A couple days later, Mary and Dave were on the beach, half-dozing in the sun in new swimsuits, and Dave had his hand on her thigh without any fixed intent. Mary saw a shado
w only a second before she heard a voice say, “Have you tried two fingertips right behind her kneecap? Just kind of describing a slow, slow circle? It drives her crazy, man.”

  Mary stiffened, squinting up at Stacia’s face. She knew at once that the “two fingers behind the kneecap” thing would never turn her on ever again. “Wow,” she said. “You’re really creeping me out.”

  “Who is this?” Dave was sitting up and squinting.

  “Uh, never mind.” Mary gathered up all their stuff into a bundle, as though fleeing a tidal wave. She seized Dave’s shoulder with both hands and steered him out of there, while Stacia tried to explain that she was just trying to help, and Mary would thank her later, and why was everybody being so judgey? Mary could still hear Stacia behind them all the way back to the transit station, until they finally got lost in the crowd.

  When they were alone on the tube, with a safe cushion of strangers all around them, Dave leaned in, one eyebrow raised with gentle humor but a concerned look in his eyes. “You want to tell me what that was about?” he said.

  Mary could hardly bring herself to say out loud what Stacia had done, because it made her skin crawl. Dave just shrugged, though, and said that all of the estate planning conferences were having seminars about the emerging problem of parceling out the newly deceased person’s neural map. And the security sector was just starting to freak out about the problem of memory embezzlement. This was the crime of the future. When you put it like that, Mary almost felt trendy.

  The next day, Dave and Mary met for sushi and Stacia was there, leaning across the bar so her face was uncomfortably close to theirs and saying things to Dave like, “Promise me you’ll take good care of this one, she’s like a tiger raised in captivity. Fierce, but trusting. Roger used to watch her in the bath. He used to keep waving goodbye long after she couldn’t see him anymore, whenever they parted ways. Roger had a crazy tidal wave of love for her, you have no idea.”