Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  I open the door and turn on the light; I’m greeted with a sight out of a furniture store display: white couch, leather loveseat, glass coffee table with a few magazines in a neat stack, abstract paintings on walls. There’s no clutter, nothing out of its assigned place. I take a deep breath. No smell of cooking, detergent, the mix of aromas that accompany places lived in by real people.

  The place seems familiar and strange at the same time, like walking through déjà vu.

  I walk through the apartment, opening doors. The closets and bedroom are as artfully arranged as the living room. Perfectly ordinary, perfectly unreal.

  Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms against the gray carpet. The golden light is Kai’s favorite shade.

  There is, however, a thin layer of dust over everything. Maybe a month or two’s worth.

  Walker Lincoln is a ghost.

  Finally, I turn around and see something hanging on the back of the front door, a mask.

  I pick it up, put it on, and step into the bathroom.

  I’m quite familiar with this type of mask. Made of soft, pliant, programmable fibers, it’s based on Tawnin technology, the same material that makes up the strands that release the Reborn back into the world. Activated with body heat, it molds itself into a pre-programmed shape. No matter the contours of the face beneath it, it rearranges itself into the appearance of a face it has memorized. Approved only for law enforcement, we sometimes use such masks to infiltrate Xenophobic cells.

  In the mirror, the cool fibers of the mask gradually come alive like Kai’s body when I touch thim, pushing and pulling against the skin and muscles of my face. For a moment my face is a shapeless lump, like a monster’s out of some nightmare.

  And then the roiling motions stop, and I’m looking into the face of Walker Lincoln.

  * * *

  Kai’s was the first face I saw the last time I was Reborn.

  It was a face with dark fish-like eyes and skin that pulsated as though tiny maggots were wriggling just under the surface. I cringed and tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. My back was against a steel wall.

  The skin around thir eyes contracted and expanded again, an alien expression I did not understand. Thie backed up, giving me some space.

  Slowly, I sat up and looked around. I was on a narrow steel slab attached to the wall of a tiny cell. The lights were too bright. I felt nauseated. I closed my eyes.

  And a tsunami of images came to me that I could not process. Faces, voices, events in fast motion. I opened my mouth to scream.

  And Kai was upon me in a second. Thie wrapped thir primary arms around my head, forcing me to stay still. A mixture of floral and spicy scents enveloped me, and the memory of it suddenly emerged from the chaos in my mind. The smell of home. I clung to it like a floating plank in a roiling sea.

  Thie wrapped thir secondary arms around me, patting my back, seeking an opening. I felt them push through a hole over my spine, a wound that I did not know was there, and I wanted to cry out in pain—

  —and the chaos in my mind subsided. I was looking at the world through thir eyes and mind: my own naked body, trembling.

  Let me help you.

  I struggled for a bit, but thie was too strong, and I gave in.

  What happened?

  You’re aboard the Judgment Ship. The old Josh Rennon did something very bad and had to be punished.

  I tried to remember what it was that I had done, but could recall nothing.

  He is gone. We had to cut him out of this body to rescue you.

  Another memory floated to the surface of my mind, gently guided by the currents of Kai’s thoughts.

  I am sitting in a classroom, the front row. Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms on the ground. Kai paces slowly back and forth in front of us.

  “Each of us is composed of many groupings of memories, many personalities, many coherent patterns of thoughts.” The voice comes from a black box Kai wears around thir neck. It’s slightly mechanical, but melodious and clear.

  “Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?

  The students around me laugh a little at this, as do I. As Kai reaches the other side of the classroom, thie turns around and our eyes meet. The skin around thir eyes pulls back, making them seem even bigger, and my face grows warm.

  “The unified individual is a fallacy of traditional human philosophy. It is, in fact, the foundation of many unenlightened, old customs. A criminal, for example, is but one person inhabiting a shared body with many others. A man who murders may still be a good father, husband, brother, son, and he is a different man when he plots death than when he bathes his daughter, kisses his wife, comforts his sister, and cares for his mother. Yet the old human criminal justice system would punish all of these men together indiscriminately, would judge them together, imprison them together, even kill them together. Collective punishment. How barbaric! How cruel!”

  I imagine my mind the way Kai describes it: partitioned into pieces, an individual divided. There may be no human institution that the Tawnin despise more than our justice system. Their contempt makes perfect sense when considered in the context of their mind-to-mind communication. The Tawnin have no secrets from each other and share an intimacy we can only dream of. The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity.

  Kai glances at me, as though thie could hear my thoughts, though I know that is not possible without my being ported. But the thought brings pleasure to me. I am Kai’s favorite student.

  I placed my arms around Kai.

  My teacher, my lover, my spouse. I was once adrift, and now I have come home. I am beginning to remember.

  I felt the scar on the back of thir head. Thie trembled.

  What happened here?

  I don’t remember. Don’t worry about it.

  I carefully caressed thim, avoiding the scar.

  The Rebirth is a painful process. Your biology did not evolve as ours, and the parts of your mind are harder to tease apart, to separate out the different persons. It will take some time for the memories to settle. You have to re-remember, relearn the pathways needed to make sense of them again, to reconstruct yourself again. But you’re now a better person, free from the diseased parts we had to cut out.

  I hung onto Kai, and we picked up the pieces of myself together.

  * * *

  I show Claire the mask, and the too-perfect electronic profile. “To get access to this kind of equipment and to create an alias with an electronic trail this convincing requires someone with a lot of power and access. Maybe even someone inside the Bureau, since we need to scrub electronic databases to cleanse the records of the Reborn.”

  Claire bites her bottom lip as she glances at the display on my phone and regards the mask with skepticism. “That seems really unlikely. All the Bureau employees are ported and are regularly probed. I don’t see how a mole among us can stay hidden.”

  “Yet it’s the only explanation.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Claire tells me. “Adam has been ported. Tau is doing the probe now. Should be done in half an hour.”

  I practically fall into the chair next to her. Exhaustion over the last two days settles over me like a heavy blanket. I have been avoiding Kai’s touch, for reasons that I cannot even explain. I feel divided from myself.

  I tell myself to stay awake, just a little longer.

  Kai and I are sitting on the leather loveseat. Thir big frame means that we are squeezed in tightly. The fireplace is behind us and I can feel the gentle h
eat against the back of my neck. Thir left arms gently stroke my back. I’m tense.

  My parents are on the white couch across from us.

  “I’ve never seen Josh this happy,” my mother says. And her smile is such a relief that I want to hug her.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” says Kai, with thir black voice box. “I think Josh was worried about how you might feel about me—about us.”

  “There are always going to be Xenophobes,” my father says. He sounds a little out of breath. I know that one day I will recognize this as the beginning of his sickness. A tinge of sorrow tints my happy memory.

  “Terrible things were done,” Kai says. “We do know that. But we always want to look to the future.”

  “So do we,” my father says. “But some people are trapped in the past. They can’t let the dead lie buried.”

  I look around the room and notice how neat the house is. The carpet is immaculate, the end tables free of clutter. The white couch my parents are sitting on is spotless. The glass coffee table between us is empty save for a stack of artfully arranged magazines.

  The living room is like the showroom of a furniture store.

  I jerk awake. The pieces of my memories have become as unreal as Walker Lincoln’s apartment.

  Tau, Claire’s spouse, is at the door. The tips of thir secondary arms are mangled, oozing blue blood. Thie stumbles.

  Claire is by thir side in a moment. “What happened?”

  Instead of answering, Tau tears Claire’s jacket and blouse away, and thir thicker, less delicate primary arms hungrily, blindly seek the Tawnin port on Claire’s back. When they finally find the opening, they plunge in and Claire gasps, going limp immediately.

  I turn my eyes away from this scene of intimacy. Tau is in pain and needs Claire.

  “I should go,” I say, getting up.

  “Adam had booby-trapped his spine,” Tau says through thir voice box.

  I pause.

  “When I ported him, he was cooperative and seemed resigned to his fate. But when I began the probe, a miniature explosive device went off, killing him instantly. I guess some of you still hate us so much that you’d rather die than be Reborn.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I’m the one that’s sorry,” Tau says. The mechanical voice struggles to convey sorrow, but it sounds like an imitation to my unsettled mind. “Parts of him were innocent.”

  * * *

  The Tawnin do not care much for history, and now, neither do we.

  They also do not die of old age. No one knows how old the Tawnin are: centuries, millennia, eons. Kai speaks vaguely of a journey that lasted longer than the history of the human race.

  What was it like? I once asked.

  I don’t remember, thie had thought.

  Their attitude is explained by their biology. Their brains, like the teeth of sharks, never cease growing. New brain tissue is continuously produced at the core while the outer layers are sloughed off periodically like snakeskin.

  With lives that are for all intents and purposes eternal, the Tawnin would have been overwhelmed by eons of accumulated memories. It is no wonder that they became masters of forgetting.

  Memories that they wish to keep must be copied into the new tissue: retraced, recreated, re-recorded. But memories that they wish to leave behind are cast off like dried pupa husks with each cycle of change.

  It is not only memory that they leave behind. Entire personalities can be adopted, taken on like a role, and then cast aside and forgotten. A Tawnin views the self before a change and the self after a change as entirely separate beings: different personalities, different memories, different moral responsibilities. They merely shared a body seriatim.

  Not even the same body, Kai thought to me.

  ?

  In about a year every atom in your body will have been replaced by others, thought Kai. This was back when we had first become lovers, and thie was often in a lecturing mood. For us it’s even faster.

  Like the ship of Theseus where each plank was replaced over time, until it was no longer the same ship.

  You’re always making these references to the past. But the flavor of thir thought was indulgent rather than critical.

  When the Conquest happened, the Tawnin had adopted an attitude of extreme aggression. And we had responded in kind. The details, of course, are hazy. The Tawnin do not remember them, and most of us do not want to. California is still uninhabitable after all these years.

  But then, once we had surrendered, the Tawnin had cast off those aggressive layers of their minds—the punishment for their war crimes—and become the gentlest rulers imaginable. Now committed pacifists, they abhor violence and willingly share their technology with us, cure diseases, perform wondrous miracles. The world is at peace. Human life expectancy has been much lengthened, and those willing to work for the Tawnin have done well for themselves.

  The Tawnin do not experience guilt.

  We are a different people now, Kai thought. This is also our home. And yet some of you insist on tasking us with the sins of our dead past selves. It is like holding the son responsible for the sins of the father.

  What if war should occur again? I thought. What if the Xenophobes convince the rest of us to rise up against you?

  Then we might change yet again, become ruthless and cruel as before. Such changes in us are physiological reactions against threat, beyond our control. But then those future selves would have nothing to do with us. The father cannot be responsible for the acts of the son.

  It’s hard to argue with logic like that.

  * * *

  Adam’s girlfriend, Lauren, is a young woman with a hard face that remained unchanged after I informed her that, as Adam’s parents are deceased, she is considered the next of kin and responsible for picking up the body at the station.

  We are sitting across from each other, the kitchen table between us. The apartment is tiny and dim. Many of the lightbulbs have burnt out and not been replaced.

  “Am I going to be ported?” she asks.

  Now that Adam is dead, the next order of business is to decide which of his relatives and friends should be ported—with appropriate caution for further booby-trapped spines—so that the true extent of the conspiracy can be uncovered.

  “I don’t know yet,” I say. “It depends on how much I think you’re cooperating. Did he associate with anyone suspicious? Anyone you thought was a Xenophobe?”

  “I don’t know anything,” she says. “Adam is … was a loner. He never told me anything. You can port me if you want, but it will be a waste of energy.”

  Normally, people like her are terrified of being ported, violated. Her feigned nonchalance only makes me more suspicious of her.

  She seems to sense my skepticism and changes tack. “Adam and I would sometimes smoke oblivion or do blaze.” She shifts in her seat and looks over at the kitchen counter. I look where she’s looking and see the drug paraphernalia in front of a stack of dirty dishes, like props set out on a stage. A leaky faucet drips, providing a background beat to the whole scene.

  Oblivion and blaze both have strong hallucinogenic effects. The unspoken point: her mind is riddled with false memories that even when ported cannot be relied upon. The most we can do is Rebirth her, but we won’t find out anything we can use on others. It’s not a bad trick. But she hasn’t made the lie sufficiently convincing.

  You humans think you are what you’ve done, Kai once thought. I remember us lying together in a park somewhere, the grass under us, and I loved feeling the warmth of the sun through thir skin, so much more sensitive than mine. But you’re really what you remember.

  Isn’t that the same thing? I thought.

  Not at all. To retrieve a memory, you must reactivate a set of neural connections, and in the process change them. Your biology is such that with each act of recall, you also rewrite the memory. Haven’t you ever had the experience of discovering that a detail you remembered vividly was manufactured? A
dream you became convinced was a real experience? Being told a fabricated story you believed to be the truth?

  You make us sound so fragile.

  Deluded, actually. The flavor of Kai’s thought was affectionate. You cannot tell which memories are real and which memories are false, and yet you insist on their importance, base so much of your life on them. The practice of history has not done your species much good.

  Lauren averts her eyes from my face, perhaps thinking of Adam. Something about Lauren seems familiar, like the half-remembered chorus from a song heard in childhood. I like the indescribable way her face seems to relax as she is lost in memories. I decide, right then, that I will not have Lauren ported.

  Instead, I retrieve the mask from my bag and, keeping my eyes on her face, I put it on. As the mask warms to my face, clinging to it, shaping muscle and skin, I watch her eyes for signs of recognition, for confirmation that Adam and Walker were co-conspirators.

  Her face becomes tight and impassive again. “What are you doing? That thing’s creepy looking.”

  Disappointed, I tell her, “Just a routine check.”

  “You mind if I deal with that leaky faucet? It’s driving me crazy.”

  I nod and remain seated as she gets up. Another dead end. Could Adam really have done it all on his own? Who was Walker Lincoln?

  I’m afraid of the answer that’s half formed in my mind.

  I sense the heavy weight swinging towards the back of my head, but it’s too late.

  * * *

  “Can you hear us?” The voice is scrambled, disguised by some electronic gizmo. Oddly, it reminds me of a Tawnin voice box.

  I nod in the darkness. I’m seated and my hands are tied behind me. Something soft, a scarf or a tie, is wrapped tightly around my head, covering my eyes.

  “I’m sorry that we have to do things this way. It’s better if you can’t see us. This way, when your Tawnin probes you, we won’t be betrayed.”

  I test the ties around my wrists. They’re very well done. No possibility of working them loose on my own.