by Zack Jordan
“Um,” she says suddenly, breaking dozens of gazes when her head snaps up. “Where’s my stuff?”
“No idea,” says Roche.
“Roche has it,” says Mer at the same time.
“That is an utter—”
“Don’t be like that, Roche. She saved you.”
Roche looks up at the ceiling and produces a low grind that Sarya’s Network unit would probably tell her is annoyance. With a click and a hiss, his torso slides open with a puff of cold vapor. He reaches inside himself, then holds both hands out in front of him.
Sarya has never been so glad to see a few grams of synthetic materials. She leaps forward and seizes her locket and earbuds, their freezing surfaces stinging her bandaged fingers. The earbuds are painfully cold when she slides them into her ear canals, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as the tiny projector rests on her forehead where it should be, the world exists again. Information springs from all three of the people in her room and the hallway, names and tiers and public biographies and—goddess, the little one really is a three. Sarya stares at the mess of blinking eyes on the floor and wonders again: how does she fit that much brain in a head that size? But the eyes aren’t staring back anymore; they are looking at Roche. More specifically, they are looking at Roche’s other hand, and when Sarya follows the gazes she understands why.
There, in Roche’s other hand, a pulsing and glowing sphere of light has spun into existence. It is a shimmering globe of Standard symbols, a blend of orange light and holograms, and anchored in the center is the phrase [Error: Unauthorized User].
“That’s…mine?” Sarya asks uncertainly, watching the symbols spiral.
“Is it not?” asks Roche, cutting off the light show when he closes his hand. “Because in that case—”
“I mean, yeah,” she says, holding out her hand. “Obviously it’s mine.”
She nearly drops the object when it is grudgingly placed into her palm, mostly because all the symbols floating around it make its size impossible to determine. She feels something cold and heavy rolling in her hand under all that light, something dense and maybe thumb-sized with an embossed logo on one side. “I just…I’ve never seen it before,” she says, staring. But even as she says it, a memory flashes through her mind. She shivers.
The sphere turns white. “Hello, new user,” says the device in a tinny voice. “Please identify yourself.”
“How odd,” says Roche. “To own something you’ve never seen before.”
“What is it?” says Mer.
Roche takes a step toward Sarya, nearly stepping on a spellbound Sandy. “That,” he says, pointing with a gleaming finger, “is a—”
“Help Article Number One: Welcome to Memory Vault!” says the device in a piercing voice, vibrating against Sarya’s hand with each syllable. “Do you find your memories cumbersome to organize? Do you recall things you would rather not? With the AivvTech Memory Vault, non-ideal mnemonic experiences will soon be a distant memory. Remove, add, rearrange, and edit your recollections to shape your ideal past. Store your extra memories for later reminiscence, or transfer them to loved ones to—”
“Enough, device,” says Roche.
Mer scratches his head with a long black talon. “A box of memories,” he says. “How about that.”
Roche is still staring at Sarya’s hands, every lens extended. “That is very highly regulated technology,” he says. “Difficult to come by. Always interesting, if you can get them open. You see them occasionally in my line of work.”
Mer is now scratching several other places. “What is your line of work?” he asks.
Roche performs a motion that Sarya’s unit interprets as a [shrug]. “Stealing things, lately.”
Sarya stands in her quarters, gazing into the slowly shifting symbols drifting over her hand. She has seen this before, she’s sure of it. Slowly, wonderingly, she raises the glowing object to her temple. She can feel her pulse mounting as she does it, and sweat prickles her back.
“Authorized user detected,” says the tiny voice. “Hello, Sarya the Daughter. Please unlock this device to continue.”
She pulls it away and stares. The symbols have changed to blue, and the phrase [Welcome, Authorized User!] now slowly orbits. “It really is mine,” she says softly.
“You’ll need a viewer,” says Roche, taking another step forward. “Memories are of course multisense, and very tricky to transfer. As my mind has been recently backed up, I volunteer. You unlock it, I will experience them and…well, I suppose we’ll go from there.”
“Why do you know so much about this?” asks Mer, now nibbling delicately at the point of a talon.
“When you’ve lived as many lives as I have, you learn a thing or two.”
But Sarya barely hears this argument because she’s hearing a different one: one from the past. Her mother’s face fills her mind, clicking in annoyance and exasperation. I do not remember, child, says Shenya the Widow. She must have repeated that phrase a thousand times, in answer to a thousand questions. Sarya never understood it: Mothers do not lie to Daughters, that’s what the proverb says, but how could her mother have forgotten so much? How could a mother not remember where her adopted daughter came from?
Unless…
She rolls the device over and rubs the corporate logo on the side. “They’re not my memories,” she breathes.
They’re something better. They’re everything she’s always wanted to know.
Sarya has now been in her quarters for eleven consecutive hours and she has discovered a fundamental truth: obsession, it seems, is the key to sanity. She knows that because in all that time, she has barely thought about Watertower at all. A hundred times, possibly. Maybe not even that.
Unfortunately, in that same time she has also developed a killer headache. The spot directly above her left eyebrow throbs with her heartbeat, and every time she moves too suddenly it instructs her sharply: don’t do that. She should probably sleep; she can tell from the softness of her room lights that the ship is deep in its night cycle. But how can you sleep when you are so close?
She sits on the lower of the two bunks, knees drawn up to her chin and arms wrapped around her legs. This is how Mother always liked for her to sit, in her nest, as she called it—see, and that is exactly the kind of memory she is trying to avoid. No. She is here now, in a bunk. She is now. She is alone, and she has no interest in useless reminiscence. She wants those memories, the ones locked in the Memory Vault. There it is, lying at the other end of the bunk where it was most recently thrown. She turned it to Network-only mode hours ago because the real light was annoying, but with everything off it looks small and black and naked. She moves, and its half-sphere of light snaps on instantly. It’s orange, still displaying its last error message.
[Identity: valid (Sarya the Daughter). Key: invalid. Please assume the mindset used to lock this device.]
Sarya has, over the eleven hours, extensively interviewed the sub-legal intelligence inhabiting this device. She has asked questions, requested sections of its manual, argued with it, shouted at it, and thrown its tiny indestructible self multiple times. She has learned two things. Number one: she was right. The memories aren’t hers. She’s gleaned from the errors and warnings that they are not even her species. Which fits precisely with her working theory. And two?
She knows how to unlock it.
Unfortunately, this second piece of knowledge is entirely theoretical. To quote [Section 51: Keeping Your Memories Secure], subpart 4, paragraph 1:
A double key is the only unique combination of identity plus mindset that will unlock a Memory Vault. In other words, to access the memories stored in a Memory Vault, the user must assume the same mindset that was used to lock the device in the first place. As mindsets can be difficult to reproduce, we recommend an extreme yet unique combination of emotions. To further improve key
recognition, try adding a mnemonic phrase during the lock procedure (see [Section 12] for examples and other helpful tips).
What this means, both encouragingly and frustratingly, is that she was there when it was locked. Her identity itself is half the key. Which means, in turn, that she must have the other half somewhere in this useless hunk of brain. There is a mindset somewhere in there, a unique combination of emotions that only she can provide, but it is lost in the wide wasteland of her own mind.
She clicks the worst Widow profanity she knows, one her mother would have been shocked to hear, and jams the heels of her hands into her eyes. What is wrong with you, brain? Is it so much to ask, that you supply one simple little goddess-damned memory?
Of course, it’s more complicated than that and she knows it. Sarya has long realized that her memories are divided into three basic categories. The vast majority of them are the regular kind: memories of school, of neighbors, of unkind classmates, of long afternoons in the arboretum, of the exploration of the lesser-known parts of Watertower, that sort of thing. They’re not all pleasant, but they’re all very humdrum. Typical. Then, below that, there is a second category. These are pale impressions of…somewhere else. They are insubstantial memories, so delicate that she can’t even look at them directly for fear of destroying them. But they do not come from Watertower, she is sure of that. They are warmer than that, and louder. There is…well, if not joy, then at least something positive. But the third category of memories?
That’s the nightmare fuel.
Unfortunately, category three is nestled mandible-to-mandible with category two. This is the reason she has to watch her daydreaming, because you don’t dive too deeply into your childhood recollections if at any moment you know you could come across a horror. For example: start with a warm and flickering glow in something that looks like Watertower’s arboretum. Add a circle of intelligences around this glow, each one laughing and talking. Throw in an amazing, mouthwatering smell—and a very specific image of glowing bugs wobbling through air. It’s a wonderful image, and one she would love to dwell on…but then it goes and ends in blood. There are lifeless eyes, there is a deafening shriek that never ends, there is something cold and hard and chittering that drags her into darkness—
It only gets worse from there.
But it’s not as bad as it could be. She hasn’t awakened screaming for years now—well, almost a year. She’s not even afraid of the dark anymore—anyway, no more than anyone else. Surely that’s universal, though. Hasn’t everyone awoken, sweat-covered, from a broken sleep? And then lay awake in a cold blackness so complete that it’s impossible to tell whether your eyes are open or closed, trying not to whimper because of what happened last time? And then come to the horrific realization that a set of faceted eyes has been hovering centimeters in front of your face, watching you the whole time?
Isn’t that just childhood?
“You know, I didn’t have a childhood,” says Helper’s voice in her ears. “But if I did, I think I’d prefer it not to be like that.”
Sarya rubs her eyes. Apparently she’s been talking out loud again. “I don’t remember saying your name,” she says.
“Well, you never technically said goodbye last time, so—”
“And don’t you have some research to do?” she says. She can’t help it. Eleven hours of focus can erase anyone’s natural civility—more so if you don’t have a lot to begin with.
“Well, I finished The Fall of Watertower, which I think turned out pretty good. But I mean, I don’t really know what to do with it. Because, you know, your friend…”
“My friend?”
“Well, she’s…dead. I mean, she was on Watertower, and Watertower got blown up, so I figured, you know…”
Oh, right. The friend. Well, if the destruction of Watertower has a bright spot, it’s that Sarya’s web of lies has become far simpler.
“Sorry for your loss, by the way,” says Helper. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
The headache has been throbbing with every word, and this reminder of her former home has not helped. Probably it’s a bad sign that her primary reaction is not sorrow but annoyance. Now she’s going to have to come up with a brand new way to keep Helper motivated. Although now that she thinks about it…does she need to? It seems silly now, having a sub-legal caretaker intelligence doing research on legends when she has the real thing now, scarcely a blade’s width away. The truth is locked in that goddess-damned Vault sitting over there. Yes, you, the light show. A smug-looking device if ever she’s seen one, probably pleased that she’s devoted every waking moment to it. Low-tiers love attention—don’t they, Vault? Low-tiers adore this kind of thing. This one is obviously enjoying locking her out of her birthright, preventing her from making the greatest discovery since—
“What if I turn off the lights?” asks Helper.
Sarya’s mouth, which had opened to tell Helper exactly what it could do with itself, closes again. Turn off the lights and plunge this room into complete darkness while she racks her mind for nightmares? Her first reaction is: that is a terrible idea. Her second, barely a second later, is that this might be the best idea Helper has ever had. “Do it,” she says.
The total blackness into which she is dropped is, perhaps, more than she was prepared for. Her Network unit throws its usual pale lines over the walls and floor, but they don’t do much to chase the blackness. They emphasize it, if anything, and her anger is quickly drowned in a rising tide of panic. But this isn’t Sarya’s first brush with darkness, and she knows how to deal with it. You keep your head above it, for one thing. And then you focus on something—something real. Like this splash of color, the orange globe of light lying at the other end of her bunk. Note the detail in its slowly shifting sphere of symbols. Think about how it came to be. It’s all virtual, just the work of a tiny projector, but isn’t it interesting how much effort her Network unit has gone to just to make it look realistic? Look at that slight glow on the underside of the upper bunk, the ripples of color on her clothing. It’s hard to believe she is sitting in complete darkness right now, that if she took the little projector off her forehead she would be left in a void so perfect that—
Nope.
“How’s that?” asks Helper. “How did I do?”
She is not about to admit this to the little intelligence, but its normally annoying voice is actually somewhat comforting in the darkness. “You…did great, Helper,” she says, deciding even as she says it that this will be her absolute last attempt for the night. Then she’ll have Helper turn the lights up a little, just enough to sleep. Hear that, mind? You’ll get your sleep. You just have to do one little thing first. Just hand over that one teensy memory, whatever it is. It’s in there, she knows it is. She’ll just avert her attention, just sit quietly and wait, and the memory will just pop up like a bubble. See how clear you can be, mind? See how relaxed, how empty, how—
“I’ve been thinking,” says Helper. “Now that my user is a little older—and, you know, I’ll maybe be getting new responsibilities and stuff—maybe it’s time for…a new name?”
The only thing that stops Sarya from ripping her Network unit from her head and flinging it across the room is the fact that she would be left, sightless and deaf, in utter darkness. Her second impulse, hot on the heels of the first, is not just to silence Helper but to reset it entirely. She could start from scratch tomorrow, if she really feels the need to be irritated. She progresses through a half dozen other notions, each more extreme than the last, and finally finds that she is just too tired to handle anything more than a simple dull annoyance. “A new name,” she says in a dead voice.
“I mean, it could be anything you want,” says Helper. “Anything at all. I mean, I’m just a random sub-legal intelligence.”
“Anything?”
“Of course!” says Helper. “Or Ace. I mean, yo
ur choice.”
Sarya stares into the darkness, at the little icon in her overlay that represents Sarya’s Little Helper. “You want to be called Ace,” she says.
“Well,” says Helper more quietly, “I mean, if you want to call me that.”
Does every sub-legal intelligence harbor secret desires and motivations? How long has Helper wanted a name? This specific name? It’s stupid, of course. It’s just a low-tier intelligence. But then so is Eleven, right?
“All right,” she says. It’s an easy win, and it’ll give her some currency for future requests. Remember that time I let you pick your name? “Fine.”
“Really?”
“Really. Sarya’s Little Helper, set your name to Ace.”
“And…pronouns too?” asks the former Sarya’s Little Helper hopefully.
Why not. “Sure,” she says. “Which ones do you—”
“He,” says the voice instantly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think definitely he.”
“Okay. Sarya’s Lit—Ace—set your pronouns to the he family.”
“Ace here!” says the voice in her ears, sounding exuberant even for it—for him, rather. “Pronouns: he family! Nice to meet you! How can I, Ace, improve your evening?”
Sarya blinks at the eagerness in the small voice. How did she not think of this earlier? Just from a logistical point of view, if you want to keep a low-tier productive, wish fulfillment is a whole lot easier than keeping your lies straight. Especially if it costs you next to nothing.
“Well…Ace,” says Sarya, dropping her voice to a more serious-sounding pitch, “I have something I’m working on here. And it is super important that I not be disturbed.”
“All right,” whispers Ace in return. “How can I, Ace, help?”