Lightspeed Magazine Issue 2
Page 5
You stare the creature down and wait.
The go-around takes several minutes, but the creature finally tacks on a massive surcharge and lets you through.
Settling into the capsule’s launch chair, the long lines of the launch tube visible through the tiny portholes ahead of you, you pull your new overcoat closely around you.
You wonder if Susan can find room for you on her mining ship.
It’s a wild non-world out there. One where humans are minorities, alien conglomerates ply the worlds and negotiate with primitives like your own people for their gas giants and extra unused planets. They trade them for space access, advanced technology. Beads and glass many suspect, but not to primitive planets like Earth.
This is your new environment.
ShinnCo you can leave behind.
You reach your hand up and caress the data amulet hanging from your neck. It is the memory of a sandy beach, your back relaxed against a palm tree. The gentle swish of the wind through leaves and water breaking against rocks at the end of the bay soothes you. That’s it. A single memory of a life you once wanted to remember back. ShinnCo put a lot of security around it. Your past is the past.
The chair wraps around your waist and comes down your shoulders. You are the person you make yourself to be.
Fifteen seconds.
You are the person you are now.
The whine of the accelerators reaches a crescendo.
You’re not going to look into the past and what you were.
Three seconds.
It really isn’t important.
Launch.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written four novels: Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, and the New York Times bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, a pair of (twin) daughters, and his wife.
Spotlight: Tobias S. Buckell
Author of “Manumission”
The character of Pepper appears in your novels and other short stories. Where in the “Pepper timeline” does this story fall?
This story comes sometime after “The Fish Merchant,” and before the story “Resistance.” And of course, well before the novels I’ve written.
What influenced your decision to tell this story in second person?
Originally this story was written in third person past, the usual choice for stories. There was a great deal of sparkle just not appearing, and I was looking for a way to get the story to pop for me as an author as I kept redrafting it. Often, when I’m having trouble with the sentence level work, I’ll change the tense or point of view in order to shake my habits up, and then turn the story back into the normal third person point of view and past tense in order to get it back to the standard. In this case, I liked the effect so much I decided to keep it. It really gave the story more impact, and it let me play with the narrative voice in ways I couldn’t. Since Pepper had his memory stolen from him, it also lent itself, I thought, to being a story the reader could slip into as a blank slate. So the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.
Why do you think memory loss is such a terrifying and sad idea? How do you approach writing a character that knows little to nothing about their past?
I think authors turn to it a lot because often we don’t know much about the character when we start writing a story. It is convenient. Sometimes lazy. But I love amnesiac characters, slowly discovering their past. It’s one of my favorite tropes, and I have a collection of books and movies featuring it, because it always works for me.
Mostly I became interested in it when I started reading about the fact that people are starting to figure out how to erase, block, and alter memories in labs. And I began thinking, since corporations are always viewing everything as a potential acquirable resource, why wouldn’t they own someone else’s memories? As a down payment on services? You can walk away from a house that’s been pledged as collateral, or savings. But your identity? They’d really own you.
ShinnCo owns Pepper by telling him that he can work his way back to his memories. What inspired you to feature such a manipulative company? What do they have to gain?
The more I read about modern corporations the more radically cynical about them I’m becoming. The idea that they’d use your memories against you, own them and in the process you, didn’t seem like that much of a leap. Everything discoverable is monetizable. They tried to copyright DNA strands. Why not take your memories and use them to keep you on a leash?
For those who might be new to your work, can you talk a bit about your background and using the Caribbean as a backdrop for much of your work?
I was born in Grenada, in the Caribbean, and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands. So when I grew up, I didn’t see much in the way of the islands or people from other non-Western worlds in the science fiction I was reading. As a result, a large amount of my fiction features call outs to the Caribbean, Caribbean characters, and focuses a bit on ideas that come out of that area of the world.
What new projects do you have coming out that you’d like to tell our readers about?
My short story collection Tides from The New Worlds is floating around out there in eBook stores, as well as in a beautiful limited edition hardcover from Wyrm Publishing. Other projects are hopefully coming down the pipeline soon!
You Are the Person You Are Now by The Evil Monkey
Buddhist interpretations of personhood suggest that we have a misguided understanding of our own internal reality; we perceive ourselves as part of a continuous state of being, moving from day to day and year to year. You, my friend, are a constant. An individual. Self-awareness is self-evident, right?
That perception, however, may be wrong. Personalities can change as we walk through life. One day you’re happy, the next, angry at losing your job. That anger can change you. Fear can change you, and some Buddhists would argue that you’re really a new person from moment to moment, with memory providing only the illusion of continuity. Events can set us free, scar us temporarily or permanently. Memory is not just a personal narrative, it shapes who we are. We recall our memories and reflect upon them, and that mere act of reflection and evaluation can alter our choices and, thus, who we become.
So, in light of that, consider this man: Henry Gustav Molaison, for years known only as Patient HM. Back in the 50s, HM suffered from intractable seizures, painful episodes that made life unbearable, and it was concluded, after careful evaluation, that surgery was his last, best option. So, on September 1st, 1953, Doctor William Scoville opened up HM’s skull and cut out large swathes of his temporal cortex, his amygdala, his hippocampus—all brain areas that deal with types of memory.
His epilepsy was gone, sure. But with it, also, went a crucial part of his, or anyone’s, personality: the ability to create and update the narrative of his life.
Anterograde Amnesia is the name of the condition.
Think Memento. HM could remember things almost up to the “event”—his surgery—but he was completely bereft of the ability to form any new memories afterwards. He was stuck, mentally, in a moment with no way of moving forward. He could remember what his wife looked like when they married but couldn’t recognize her decades later. He was a stranger in the mirror. He could hold information in his short-term memory for a few moments, perhaps minutes if not distracted, but any longer and it would just evaporate. And if he met you, he couldn’t recall it, not even if you re-introduce yourself to him ten seconds later. Or ten seconds after that. Or after that.
Declarative memories, or memories you can tell somebody about (e.g. episodic: “I was at the library.” Or semantic: “Delaware was the first state.”) were a problem as well, but previously learned motor skills like riding a bike were fine, clearly demonstrating there is no monolithic entity known as “memory” that is controlled by a single brain area, or even a handful of them.
Back then it was thought that HM’s deficit was due solely to hippocampal damage, but obviously we’ve learned that isn’t the whole story. The hippocampus, a sea-horse shaped structure in the brain, is needed to form new memories and access some older memories, but many of those “long-term” memories are actually stored in numerous cortical areas as widely dispersed “neural nets.” There isn’t a specific physical location, per se, that corresponds to, say, remembering your first kiss. Stimulation of a specific brain region can trigger the memory, but likely because of activation of a distributed network of brain cells that all talk to each other.
As for destroying past memories, now that’s a whole other story. Retrograde Amnesia, which makes the science fiction and noir genres so great, isn’t too hard. So what if that rat has run the maze for months? Bam! Lesion—the rat has no clue how to find the cheese. We can cause some rough memory deficits similar to HM’s in animals, too. We can even do it reversibly by temporarily cooling a brain region, or by using Lidocaine or other drugs that wear off instead of removing brain parts which, let’s face it, can be a little messy.
For long-term memory suppression, there’s the drug Propranolol, which is used to treat anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is sometimes called the “amnesia drug.” That name obscures the truth a bit, though, since Propranolol doesn’t actually make somebody forget fearful things, it merely decouples emotions from events. You remember the trauma, just not the fear or anger that accompanied it.
Loss of one’s past, that Retrograde Amnesia that ironically never gets old as a plot device no matter how many times it’s used, is trickier, especially as we move towards targeted memory erasure. To be certain, people who experience traumatic events can have Retrograde Amnesia for big chunks of memories, but what if you just want to excise specific parts of your past? What if you want to pull an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and get rid of memories of that ex-girlfriend who broke your heart, for example?
First, you need a way of mapping which brain areas are active and correspond to certain undesirable memories. Right now we can do that down to a couple cubic millimeters of tissue. But that’s not enough. We would also need to map out activity of individual neurons, or, if possible, the activity of individual connections between neurons called synapses. But to give you an idea of how tremendously horrifying such an undertaking would be, there are between 10 and 100 billion neurons in the brain. Each neuron can make thousands of connections, and each connection can fire hundreds or even thousands of times a second. So…good luck with that.
Now, once this “simple” task of creating activity maps is done, we would then need a way to inhibit patterns of activity that correspond to undesirable memories. The problem here is that inhibiting those activity patterns with, pardon the pun, surgical precision might be next to impossible, at least at the synaptic level. We would have better luck wiping out cells or groups of cells, and as they say in Eternal Sunshine, technically that procedure is brain damage.
However, that still doesn’t lend itself to a spot-free mind. The more damage you do, the more your other memories will be affected. You didn’t just have a girlfriend, you also had friends in common. You went to favorite restaurants. You hung out with each others’ families for the holidays. Those memories won’t be unaffected. You won’t have a nice, clean ex-girlfriend shaped hole in each of those memories. You remove a painful memory, you leave the other memories around it all torn up and uncomfortable, because there’s no context in which to find understanding. The ones that are left have gaps that don’t make sense. So maybe those should be removed as well. Add, rinse, repeat.
And so now, here you are. You’ve got one memory left. It’s peaceful, this one. You’re a child, sitting on a beach, watching the sun go down. But this single, isolated memory, nice as it is, tells you nothing about who you are. The person you were is gone, lost at the end of a breadcrumb trail of burnt-away pasts. Good, bad, smart, dumb, all you’ve got now is your physical self and that sunset. Tabula rasa, baby.
And while, yes, the loss of all one’s memories is a nightmarish scenario to contemplate, if, like the Buddhists say, you really are a new person from moment to moment, is it such a total tragedy? You still have the ability to create new memories, right? Become a new you, write a new narrative? The action of life is forward moving. Dwelling in the past: that’s for suckers. And in that truth, perhaps, is the essence of what makes us human. Kinda profound, huh?
Now consider, once again, Patient HM. His past memories remained largely intact, and in that way, at least, he remained himself. But what he did lose was the ability to evolve from that place. He simply no longer had the machinery to change, to become a new man. And no longer having that ability to learn, to grow, to create your own future? Well, that, too, is profound.
Profoundly disturbing.
The Evil Monkey has a Ph.D. in the neurosciences and used to study memory in primates for a living. He now resides in the Midwest and spends his professional time teaching at the local state university and community college. When not teaching, he is often engaged in an endless cycle of home repair or playing with his stepkids or writing his irreverent neuroscience blog Neurotopia.
The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine
So hook yourself up to an airship
Strap on your mask and your knife
For the wide open skies are a-calling
And oh, it’s a glorious life!
—Conductors Recruitment Advertisement, 1890
The balloon of a Phoenix-class airship is better than any view from its cabin windows; half a mile of silk pulled taut across three hundred metal ribs and a hundred gleaming spines is a beautiful thing. If your mask filter is dirty you get lightheaded and your sight goes reddish, so it looks as though the balloon is falling in love with you.
When that happens, though, you tap someone to let them know and you go to the back-cabin Underneath and fix your mask, if you’ve any brains at all. If you’re helium-drunk enough to see red, soon you’ll be hallucinating and too weak to move, and even if they get you out before you die you’ll still spend the rest of your life at a hospital with all the regulars staring at you. That’s no life for an airship man.
I remember back when the masks were metal and you’d freeze in the winter, end up with layers of skin that peeled off like wet socks when you went landside and took the mask off. The polymer rubbers are much cleverer.
I’ve been a conductor for ages; I was conducting on the Majesty in ‘78 when it was still the biggest ship in the sky—you laugh, but back then people would show up by the hundreds just to watch it fly out of dock. She only had four gills, but she could cut through the air better than a lot of the six-fins, the Laconia too.
They put the Majesty in a museum already, I heard.
Strange to be so old and not feel it. At least the helium keeps us young, for all it turns us spindly and cold. God, when we realized what was happening to us! But they had warned us, I suppose, and it’s fathoms better now then it was. Back then the regulars called you a monster if they saw you on the street.
The coin’s not bad, either, compared to factory work. They say it’s terrible what you end up like, but if you work the air you get pulled like taffy, and if you work in the factory you go deaf as a post; it’s always something.
I’m saving a bit for myself for when I’m finished with this life, enough for a little house in the Alps. I need some altitude if I’m going to be landlocked; the air’s too heavy down here.
The very first ships were no better than hot-air balloons, and the conductors kept a tiny cabin and had to string themselves outside on cables if something happened. I can’t imagine it—useless.
I didn’t join up until after they moved conductors inside—it showed they had a lick of sense to put conductors where they could get to things that went wrong, and I’m not fond of looking down from heights.
The engine-shop shifted to airships a
s soon as they caught on, and I made two thousand ribs before I ever set foot inside a balloon. It makes for a certain confidence going in, which carried me through, thank goodness—I had a hard time with it at first.
You have to be careful how deeply you breathe so the oxygen filter doesn’t freeze up on you, and you have to make sure your air tube doesn’t get tangled on your tether, or your tether in someone else’s. You have to learn how to fling yourself along so that the tether ring slides with you along the spine, and how to hook your fingers quickly into the little holes in the ribs when you have to climb down. You have to learn to deal with the cold.
The sign language I picked up at once. We had that at the factory, too, signals for when we were too far apart or when it was too loud. I’m fond of it; you get used to talking through the masks, and they’re all good men in the air, but sometimes it’s nice just to keep the quiet.
Captain Carter was very kind those first few months; he was the only Captain I’ve ever had who would make trips into the balloon from the Underneath just to see how we were getting along. Back then we were all in it together, all still learning how to handle these beautiful birds.
Captains now can hardly be bothered to leave their bridges, but not Carter. Carter knew how to tighten a bolt as fast as any airship man, and he’d float through and shake hands whenever we’d done something well. He had a way of speaking about the Majesty, like a poem sometimes—a clever man. I’ve tried to speak as he did, but there’s not much use for language when we’re just bottled up with one another. Once or twice I’ve seen something sharply, the way he might have seen it—just once or twice.
You won’t see his like again. He was of the old kind; he understood what it meant to love the sky like I do.
“A patient in the profession of Zeppelin conducting has, after very few years of work, advanced Heliosis due to excessive and prolonged exposure to helium within the balloon of an airship. His limbs have grown in length and decreased in musculature, making it difficult for him to comfortably maneuver on the ground for long periods of time. Mild exercise, concurrent with the wearing of an oxygen mask to prevent hyperventilation, alleviates the symptoms in time but has no lasting effect without regular application, which is difficult for conductors to maintain while employed in their vessels.