Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  “Listen,” I said. “This is going to be really big. You guys are going places.”

  They looked at each other and laughed, and bought me and Scott drinks. It was their first big convention, and nobody else had recognized them. Travis, the artist, had actually told a dealer who stocked Minus Men in the dealers’ room that he was the artist on issue #121, and the dealer had asked him to sign all the copies in stock. Later Travis dragged Milton the writer back with him, and Milton had signed the comics, too. “But it doesn’t feel real when you make it happen yourself,” Travis said.

  “Don’t worry. I bet this is the last convention where nobody knows who you are.”

  They laughed. Milton knocked on the wooden bar for luck. I said good-bye for me and for Scott, who was mostly silent and grumpy. We went back to our car, and I hit the autoreturn button, and we went home.

  After debriefing, the boss congratulated me on another mission well run and took away my comic books. I went to the public bath and soaped and soaked, soaped and soaked, three times, trying to scrub off all the memories. Yet I didn’t really want to lose them. I felt amazed and pleased that I had managed to get around the wire and keep what was mine, no matter how awful.

  Now what?

  Stick my defense nail through Abie’s throat? Complain to one of the senior staff, start a criminal investigation? What if the senior staff were in on this? Should I just shut up and keep working the way I always had?

  Or get out of the business, join my sib’s hydro food farm? My sib and I had always been close, and she had never approved of my career. She would be pleased if I gave it up. I knew she’d accept me in her enclave if I asked. Plus, I had assets. I had banked lots of air and water. CollectorCorps paid me very well for my perfect record.

  I went home. I set my cubicle walls to old growth forest, complete with bird, wind, and insect sounds, and sat for a long time on my sleep shelf, watching sun slant down through redwood branches to touch mossy ground. I gave myself a couple hits of enriched air.

  If I never tressed again, I would never again stand on the planet’s surface and look up at the sky without a faceplate. Never again taste all the biodiversity there used to be, never drink coffee made from real beans again, never talk again to people who hadn’t grown up in holes in the ground.

  How could I keep tressing? There was camo-me, the one who pretended she didn’t remember anything, mint condition me, but she was only a cover over the blemished me who now knew what was inside. Sure, I forget every time; but I remembered every time in between forgetting. Two Sissies were living their lives in alternating stripes, and one of them got sicker and sicker of everything.

  Around 3:00 a.m. I switched my walls over to Venice Beach, California, 1979. Sun, sand, people. These were views my sampler had taped while I was there; I always debriefed my sampler into the CC information library as soon as I got home, but I’d never accessed my own records before. Déjà déjà very vu.

  I searched for Scott’s sampler recordings. There were walls to prevent my accessing something I wasn’t coded for, but I hacked through them. Now I knew why he had showed up in a business suit; he’d preprogrammed his sampler to find an image of him that a car dealer would pay attention to. Now I knew why he was so grumpy. His driving was terrible. He had been ticketed and almost arrested by police three times in the course of his solo test drive. His taste of real cars hadn’t matched his dream of driving at all.

  I jumped to my own backlog and fastscanned back to the aborted mission I barely remembered.

  My sampler had watched everything as Able set me up, even the events that happened while I was sedated. Able and another programmer had worked me over together.

  It was in my record. Along with every missing segment of my memory. I headjammed them all, confirmed what I had learned on my last mission. Some of it was horrible. Some people I had worked with did not deserved to be called people.

  It was all in my record. Senior staff had to know. The guy studying my luck probably knew. How many people knew?

  I ran off a copy of my whole record with CC, put it on a passive physical medium, sewed it into the lining of my jacket.

  In the morning I went to my boss and said I needed some time off.

  “Any special reason?” she asked.

  “I need a break.”

  She asked me again. I said I had vacation time coming to me. She shook her head, but she let me go.

  I took a tube out to my sib’s place.

  After two weeks there, I was ready to shoot everyone I knew. I did drop my nephews twice with my nail’s mildest sleep, even though my sib got really mad the first time. They were not restful children, though.

  My worst problem was skysickness. I hadn’t gone so long without seeing sky in years.

  So of course in the end I went back to work. Somehow my partner on my next mission ended up with his hand badly cobra bitten, though. I let go of my luck and kept hold on my memories.

  On every mission, no matter what else happens, I open my arms to ancient skies.