Mnemo's Memory

by David Versace

  Needless to say, his service became popular in no time. Patients fearful of overdue visits for a check-up were easily persuaded to trust the enormous gorilla which made their bed every day. Brook always used the host module's own voice rather than overwrite it with his own. Somehow the sense of familiarity overcame the fear, mistrust and shame other members of his profession often encountered in their recidivist patients.

  The novelty of the service was its prime booster: showing off the results of a whitening procedure performed by a burly great ape was a fine stimulus for dinner party conversations. For the children, he wore a pointed hat and comical bow tie; these were standard kit inclusions.

  Routine clean and polish jobs became more sophisticated. Within eight months Brook had developed a home kit which allowed him to floss, fill cavities, and install and remove braces. Medical regulators were initially reluctant to permit him to conduct complex surgery on anaesthetised patients, but within a year Brook's devoted patrons included movie stars, rock legends and highly-placed politicians, all wealthy and possessed of stratospheric clapplause ratings. Federal approvals were rushed through.

  The popularity of Brook's remote procedures skyrocketed thanks to Gabrielle Tranh, who cultivated minor celebrity, as a fashion model and hockey player forced into retirement from both careers by injury, into a lucrative SenseStream career.

  Tranh, possessed of a vivacious personality and a surprisingly high pain threshold, posted a live sensecast of a jaw reconstruction conducted by Brook through Tranh's household Silverback, whom she called Huggy George.

  Tranh's hilarious one-sided – and muffled – conversations with the enormous gorilla rewiring her mandible, with only a mild sedative for localised pain relief, was a massive SenseStream hit. Replays topped the billion mark. With a number of follow-up surgical procedures proving equally popular, Brook's career, albeit tethered to Tranh's, was made.

  Of course, Brook was not the only gorilla dentist. With demand for his services far outstripping his capacity to meet it, he took on partners. His cadre of dentals surgeons, hygienists and technical support staff was known informally as the Tooth Troop, even in later years, when the scope of the company expanded to other medical, therapeutic and educational services. School visits by Tranh and Huggy George, which included a raucous show and free dental inspections, were in high demand.

  It all came to an end following the spring 2167 launch of Takahashi's first sixth-generation synthdroids.

  The new octopoid architecture, eight undulating limbs with a hundredfold increase in haptic sensitivity, was embraced by the trend-loving public. However remote manipulation of the extra limbs with their unfamiliar articulation proved to be impossible for all but a tiny percentage of the population. The Tooth Troop, along with most of their imitators, were unable to transfer their skills to the new paradigm, and business slowly receded as Silverbacks transitioned into obsolescence.

  Brook himself suffered a minor stroke on his first and only attempt to remote pilot an octopoid synthdroid. After making a full recovery, he went into semi-retirement to produce and star in a number of educational sensecasts for schoolchildren on the importance of dental health care.

  For some years after, he also reprised his role as Huggy George, co-starring with his business and life partner Gabrielle Tranh in several well-received casts aimed at a mature audience.

  They never met in person.

  Popular discussions around advancements in virtual reality and remote manipulation technologies tend to focus disproportionately on their applications in gaming and sex. But really useful technologies are transformative to societies in ways that were not intended by their designers or even possible to predict in their early days. If we still have a functional civilisation in fifty years, it will look remarkably different from the one we have now. Though I do think it will still be recognisable in all the usual human ways.

  'Gorilla Dentists' was first published in September 2017 as a Friday Flash Fiction post at DavidVersace.com.

  The Dressmaker and the Colonel's Coat

  When the town of Mirror Springs threw a shindig to welcome the heroes back from the Cemetery Wars, the Colonel set tongues wagging by paying a call to the exiled dressmaker, Molly Bright.

  The Colonel was of a mind to turn the floor in a fetching new frock coat of peacock and gold. As everyone knew, no hand was swifter or steadier stitching good fortune into a garment than Miss Molly's.

  Back before the War, when Molly and her brother William first arrived on the Strickland Express from back East, word of her prowess ran three stops ahead of her. If the wildfire of discontent hadn't followed hot on their heels, she might have turned her little shop into a thriving concern. But when fighting broke out between mining concerns, Molly's luck followed her hot-headed brother Bill out the door.

  The Colonel's chestnut mare carried her a good mile south of the bustling town to an old miner's hut set among the slag ponds down in Venom Gully.

  What she saw was a moon-white Easterner with twisting black tresses atop a frame not near plump enough for the coming winter. She sat on an upturned fossicking tub older than she was, unpicking the seams on a saloon owner's waistcoat. She paid no particular mind as the Colonel's mount navigated the uneven path pocked with treacherous pools of sulphur-mud.

  What little attention Molly Bright spared from her work was for the dog; a rangy cur lay hunched atop a mullock mound, just beyond the stretch of afternoon shadows cast by the shack. She'd been the subject of its watchful gaze for near on two weeks. Since it seemed neither intent on making a meal of her nor accepting her tentative offers of shelter and companionship, they had fallen into an easy détente.

  A whipcrack of thunder shattered the silence. The dog scuttled away from a burst of stone and dust and retreated snarling into the maze of mine refuse.

  The Colonel holstered her smoking long-barrel with a humourless bark and leaned ahead to stroke her agitated mare behind the ear.

  Miss Molly tilted her bonnet a touch lower over her eyes before she raised them in greeting; rough experience had taught her not to share her fears casually.

  Her social sensibilities were of more resilient stock than her nerves. She paid her compliments to her guest before her heart could head them off: "How do you do, Colonel Tempest?"

  The Colonel smoothed a blue-gloved finger across a smudge on her boot. On closer inspection of her fingertip, her nose wrinkled and she gave a small tsk of disgust. With a sigh, she stripped the gloves off, balled them together and dropped them as she dismounted.

  "Your brother was Captain William Conover Bright, late of the Seventh Ranger Squadron of the Stonechurch Territorial Regiment."

  Molly conceded the familial connection with a tight nod and a shiver down her spine.

  "Your brother danced a rope jig for treason on my word of judgment, Miss Bright, as I am certain you are aware."

  Molly folded her sewing and set it with care on a barrel head laden with scissors, pincushions and threads of various hues and properties. She stood, acknowledging the declaration with a grave nod.

  "Your letter was detailed in all particulars, Colonel. I took your forthright commentary as a kindness and a courtesy, and I assure you I have no unanswered questions."

  It was not the whole truth, but Molly didn't expect her brother's executioner to satisfy her curiosity.

  "Meaning no disrespect, Colonel, but do you mean to hold me to account for my brother's actions?"

  The Colonel set one boot on the porch and crossed her arms on her knee. She was young for a senior commissioned officer, not much past thirty. Her eyes were the green of a still river and her plaits of maple brown hair matched her skin.

  "I once heard it said that the company we keep in life is a richer feed than the blood we spring from." She showed Molly her teeth; up close they were uneven, chipped and patched with amalgam. "You and your brother were close, according to my recollection."

  Molly swallowed down on the churn in her throat.
"He and I were all we had when our Father passed on, Colonel."

  "Your brother put it in just those words." Uncomfortably close now, the Colonel traced a finger from Molly's temple down along the night-black hairline to the earlobe adorned with a teardrop pendant. Molly couldn't help flinching at the fingertip's chill. "So now you have less than nothing. Mirror Springs has ostracised the traitor's sister. Now only refugees and cheapskates dare give you their business."

  Molly said, "I get by."

  "A smart, pretty thing like you could do better than just get by, is what I think." Now she flicked a cold thumb across the corner of Molly's mouth, like she was tending to a smudge. "Why didn't you heed the suggestion in my correspondence to leave for better prospects elsewhere?"

  "I can't leave," Molly whispered, imagining those cold fingers sliding down to close around her throat. "I've no choice but to stay."

  Abruptly the hand fled Molly's face as the Colonel stood. "Well now, if that's how it is, then Mistress Fortune's shining her best smile on both of us today. I'll guess you crave the embrace of a welcoming community of stout-hearted Springers, not to mention the gratifying ring of coins in your purse? I'm in a position to oblige you on both counts."

  Molly blinked, not sure whether to tally her sudden sense of shock up to relief or alarm. She'd learned better than to trust a deal without sniffing the ink. "How would you hope to be compensated for such a generous proposition, Colonel Tempest?"

  The Colonel's eyes gleamed like a moonlit snake's.

  "Oh, Molly Bright, don't you spend one ounce of concern on that score. From what your brother's said on your behalf and what I can see for myself, you've got an abundance of talent I can make use of."

  Something pushed its way past the fear in Molly's throat. She snapped, "Colonel Tempest, my brother's disgrace cost him his life. If the Fates declare there's more shame owing on his misdeeds then I guess that's my debt to carry. But I won't be drawn into unbecoming conduct, not by you nor any other."

  The Colonel picked up a coiled strip of leather from the barrel and painstakingly wrapped it around her fingers, examining the numbers punched into its skin inch by inch. Her grin put Molly in mind of a hungry cat in the company of a limping mouse.

  "If you've misunderstood my intentions, Miss Bright," she said with all the sincerity of a riverboat sharp, "then I am gravely sorry for the error. I mean to secure your services as a seamstress, of course."

  "You want me to make you a dress?"

  Spreading her arms, taking an inelegant turn across an imaginary floor, and kicking up a choke of reeking mine-dust with her boot heels, the Colonel laughed. "Do I seem to you a delicate bloom of womanhood, to be draped in petals and dusted with aromatic powders? You'll fashion me a fine dress coat. A work of finery the likes of which this dirt-blast of a town has never seen. There's a certain dishwater-grey eye I want to catch, that comes attached to a sizeable fortune and, unless I miss my guess, an ailing constitution."

  Molly understood this to refer to the widower Jeremiah Stonechurch, the wealthy patriarch of Mirror Springs, whose second wife had passed over several winters ago. She imagined the spiteful tycoon highly susceptible to a war hero's flattering attentions.

  She agreed to the proposition. In any case, she was in no position to decline it.

  "I knew you'd see things my way, Miss Bright. Now what say you and I step inside out of the glare and you take what measurements you may require?"

  #

  Much later, the Colonel mounted her horse and wheeled about for the town, not casting so much as a glance over her shoulder. The dog slunk out of the wastes and trotted after her a distance, but soon abandoned its idle pursuit in favour of further scavenging. Molly, exhausted and fraught, watched both, her bottom lip clenched between her teeth.

  Beside her stood a lean young man wearing a battered military uniform and the signs of a sour disposition. He spat something unmentionable at the dusty imprint of the Colonel's boot, where it sizzled and coughed like a twist of charcoal smoke.

  "Why'd you take that woman's commission, Little Moll? You know what she did to me."

  Molly Bright shivered against the slow fading heat and sipped brackish water from a rusted mug.

  The man tried again. "You think she's got a fancy for you, is that it? Ha! She'll betray you once she's got what she needs."

  Molly sighed, "You're dead, Big Bill. How long do I have to wait for you to behave in accordance with your condition?"

  On the day the telegraph brought word of the conclusion of the Cemetery Wars - eighteen months of range skirmishing, railroad ambushing and mining town besiegement between rival mining magnates, which the gentlemen of the press had seen fit to elevate with a fanciful name - Bill Bright's ghost had knocked on Molly's door and seen himself in.

  By then months had passed since the fateful letter's arrival; months of baleful stares, whispered recriminations and cancelled business orders. When impolite society became outright hostility, she paid the last of her coin to two sympathetic foreigners with a horse and wagon to pack up her stock and relocate it to the wastes.

  Barely had she settled herself in to tend to a meagre handful of nearly empty-handed clients before he appeared on her doorstep. Pale, translucent, with a livid mark about his neck and a new bulge about his eyes, was Bill Bright.

  He was expected. She'd hoped the Bright menfolk's tendency to linger after their mortal span would skip her generation. Grandfather Morris and his three brothers had all obliged on that score. But her hopes were slight. Harrison Bright, squire of William and Molly, persisted long past his due. Little chance for better conduct from his son, especially with so disreputable an end.

  "I got unfinished business, Moll."

  He had a rough way of speaking now. Part of it was the throaty rasp imparted by the hangman's noose, but she thought war must have coarsened him in a multitude of ways.

  "It's not my business, now is it, Bill? You won't let me leave, and now you nip at my heels to turn paying customers away? The Colonel has commissioned my services. I'd be a lackwit to decline."

  But with his customary ill-tempered pout - a notable feature of his character in life as in death - Bill vanished. His unspoken implication - "I got unfinished business with Colonel Tempest" - hung in the air at his passing.

  Molly Bright's sigh encompassed grief, self-pity and the ache of unfulfilled hopes. Then she set them aside and went to work.

  Her stock of brown paper was sadly expired, so she cleared a cabin wall hung with cookware, mining pans and a chipped enamel chamber pot. Then she took to it with her chalks, sketching out a pattern in the rough timbers, adjusting as she went with swipes of a straw broom head. She moved her small lantern from this spot to that, shifting the light to judge the design from every angle. She worked into the night, frowning and tinkering. A cinch at the waist, a minute broadening of the belt, the hem just a touch more fashionably low.

  To the side, she drew up a list of ingredients: virid-flower pollen for the suggestion of wisdom, cactus venom for sexual desirability, oils of camphor and spinewood to draw forth wealth. She had these to hand; such glamours were expected by her usual clients. After some consideration, she added horseradish oil. A button or two affixed with properly oiled thread might change a bullet's path, something someone like the Colonel might profit by.

  Just before dawn, Molly stepped outside to the porch, stuffed her last withered thimbleful of tobacco into her pipe and lit up. She was in the habit of keeping her smoke and her stock separate, as not every customer savoured the scorched aroma on their fresh-made clothes.

  The dog was back.

  The two of them regarded each other with equanimity. For her part, Molly supposed the thing must have belonged to someone once. Mirror Springs was too far from anywhere else for wild dogs to have spread here on their own, not with what stalked the wastes and desert beyond. Maybe it had been bereaved of its master, or else committed some unforgivable sin like biting a child. Whatever had brought it
to its current station, the animal's existence was a tough one. Its sunken belly, matted hide and constant shivers gave it a harried look.

  "You and me both, you scruff." Moll drew in a lungful of smoke and released it with a thoughtful stare. The dog matched her gaze, cautious but not submissive. It broke eye contact to scratch behind its ear and snap at an insect.

  Molly tapped out her ashes and pocketed the pipe. She stomped to her larder - an old rail trunk shelving depleted tins of flour, sugar, cheese and dried beans - and pulled out her last twist of salted pork. This she wrenched into two pieces.

  Clamping one between her teeth and tossing the other to the dog, she said, "I've got affairs to conduct in Mirror Springs, hound. What do you say to staying here and minding things until I return?"

  The dog sniffed at the hunk of desiccated meat and tilted its head, as if considering her proposal. Then it flopped down in the dirt and began to worry the offering with worn teeth. Its stump of tail thumped the ground just once.

  "I'll take that as a yes," said Molly Bright.

  #

  She slept poorly.

  In her dreams she relived her day of disgrace. Jeremiah Stonechurch spat and raved in the street, waving the fateful dispatch letter under the nose of every passer-by, while two of his men dragged Molly from her shop. Her own letter, which explained William Bright's complicity in the fate of Stonechurch's younger brother Abel, had not been delivered yet. Terrified and uncomprehending, she bellowed tearful denials as Stonechurch furiously detailed the charges. A few spoke up against her mistreatment at first, but fell into an angry silence as Bill's crimes were laid out. The ordeal continued for what seemed like hours, the main street of Mirror Springs spilling over as Stonechurch's congregation grew. Through swelling red eyes Molly searched in vain for a friendly look, but if anyone felt sympathy, they guarded their emotions well. When at last his rage petered out to a steady simmer, Stonechurch gave her two days to get out of town. She'd spent the night shaking in terror behind her shop counter as threats were shouted from the door and every window smashed with rocks. Not a minute passed by without her expecting to see a flaming bottle of rotgut tequila fly through a shattered window frame and set her stock alight.