by Irene Gallo
“You have to stop this right now,” I say, putting as much authority into my voice as I can. “I know you think you’ve caught a collaborator, a traitor to the human race. You believe this is justice, vengeance. But think. If you harm me, you’ll eventually be caught, and all your memory of this event erased. What’s the good of vengeance if you won’t even remember it? It will be as if it never happened.”
Electronic voices laugh in the darkness. I can’t tell how many of them there are. Old, young, male or female.
“Let me go.”
“We will,” the first voice says, “after you hear this.”
I hear the click of a button being pressed, and then, a disembodied voice: “Hello, Josh. I see you’ve found the clues that matter.”
The voice is my own.
* * *
“… despite extensive research, it is not possible to erase all memories. Like an old hard drive, the Reborn mind still holds traces of those old pathways, dormant, waiting for the right trigger…”
The corner of Walker and Lincoln, my old house.
Inside, it’s cluttered, my toys scattered everywhere. There is no couch, only four wicker chairs around an old wooden coffee table, the top full of circular stains.
I’m hiding behind one of the wicker chairs. The house is quiet and the lighting dim, early dawn or late dusk.
A scream outside.
I get up and run to the door and fling it open. I see my father being hoisted into the air by a Tawnin’s primary arms. The secondary and tertiary arms are wrapped around my father’s arms and legs, rendering him immobile.
Behind the Tawnin, my mother’s body lies prostrate, unmoving.
The Tawnin jerks its arms and my father tries to scream again, but blood has pooled in his throat, and what comes out is a mere gurgle. The Tawnin jerks its limbs again and I watch as my father is torn slowly into pieces.
The Tawnin looks down at me. The skin around its eyes recedes and contracts again. The smell of unknown flowers and spices is so strong that I retch.
It’s Kai.
“… in the place of real memories, they fill your mind with lies. Constructed memories that crumble under examination…”
Kai comes to me on the other side of my cage. There are many cages like it, each holding a young man or woman. How many years have we been in darkness and isolation, kept from forming meaningful memories?
There was never any well-lit classroom, any philosophical lecture, any sunlight slanting in from the western windows, casting clean, sharp parallelograms against the ground.
“We’re sorry for what happened,” Kai says. The voice box, at least, is real. But the mechanical tone belies the words. “We’ve been saying this for a long time. The ones who did those things you insist on remembering are not us. They were necessary for a time, but they have been punished, cast off, forgotten. It’s time to move on.”
I spit in Kai’s eyes.
Kai does not wipe away my spittle. The skin around its eyes contracts and it turns away. “You leave us no choice. We have to make you anew.”
“… they tell you that the past is the past, dead, gone. They tell you that they are a new people, not responsible for their former selves. And there is some truth to these assertions. When I couple with Kai, I see into thir mind, and there is nothing left of the Kai that killed my parents, the Kai that brutalized the children, the Kai that forced us by decree to burn our old photographs, to wipe out the traces of our former existence that might interfere with what they want for our future. They really are as good at forgetting as they say, and the bloody past appears to them as an alien country. The Kai that is my lover is truly a different mind: innocent, blameless, guiltless.
“But they continue to walk over the bones of your, my, our parents. They continue to live in houses taken from our dead. They continue to desecrate the truth with denial.
“Some of us have accepted collective amnesia as the price of survival. But not all. I am you, and you’re me. The past does not die; it seeps, leaks, infiltrates, waits for an opportunity to spring up. You are what you remember…”
The first kiss from Kai, slimy, raw.
The first time Kai penetrates me. The first time my mind is invaded by its mind. The feeling of helplessness, of something being done to me that I can never be rid of, that I can never be clean again.
The smell of flowers and spices, the smell that I can never forget or expel because it doesn’t just come from my nostrils, but has taken root deep in my mind.
“… though I began by infiltrating the Xenophobes, in the end it is they who infiltrated me. Their underground records of the Conquest and the giving of testimony and sharing of memories finally awoke me from my slumber, allowed me to recover my own story.
“When I found out the truth, I carefully plotted my vengeance. I knew it would not be easy to keep a secret from Kai. But I came up with a plan. Because I was married to Kai, I was exempt from the regular probes that the other TPB agents are subject to. By avoiding intimacy with Kai and pleading discomfort, I could avoid being probed altogether and hold secrets in my mind, at least for a while.
“I created another identity, wore a mask, provided the Xenophobes with what they needed to accomplish their goals. All of us wore masks so that if any of the co-conspirators were captured, probing one mind would not betray the rest of us.”
The masks I wear to infiltrate the Xenophobes are the masks I give to my co-conspirators …
“Then I prepped my mind like a fortress against the day of my inevitable capture and Rebirth. I recalled the way my parents died in great detail, replayed the events again and again until they were etched indelibly into my mind, until I knew that Kai, who would ask for the role of preparing me for my Rebirth, would flinch at the vivid images, be repulsed by their blood and violence, and stop before probing too deep. Thie had long forgotten what thie had done and had no wish to be reminded.
“Do I know if these images are true in every aspect? No, I do not. I recalled them through the hazy filter of the mind of a child, and no doubt the memories shared by all the other survivors have inseminated them, colored them, given them more details. Our memories bleed into each other, forming a collective outrage. The Tawnin will say they’re no more real than the false memories they’ve implanted, but to forget is a far greater sin than to remember too well.
“To further conceal my trails, I took the pieces of the false memories they gave me and constructed real memories out of them so that when Kai dissected my mind, thie would not be able to tell thir lies apart from my own.”
The false, clean, clutter-free living room of my parents is recreated and rearranged into the room in which I meet with Adam and Lauren …
Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms on the ground …
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.
“And now, when I’m sure that the plot has been set in motion but do not yet know enough details to betray the plans should I be probed, I will go attack Kai. There is very little chance I will succeed, and Kai will surely want me to be Reborn, to wipe this me away—not all of me, just enough so that our life together can go on. My death will protect my co-conspirators, will allow them to triumph.
“Yet what good is vengeance if I cannot see it, if you, the Reborn me, cannot remember it, and know the satisfaction of success? This is why I have buried clues, left behind evidence like a trail of crumbs that you will pick up, until you can remember and know what you have done.”
Adam Woods … who is not so different from me after all, his memory a trigger for mine …
I purchase things so that, someday, they’ll trigger in another me the memory of fire …
The mask, so that others can remember me …
Walker Lincoln.
* * *
Claire is outside the station, waiting, when I walk back. Two
men are standing in the shadows behind her. And still further behind, looming above them, the indistinct figure of Kai.
I stop and turn around. Behind me, two more men are walking down the street, blocking off my retreat.
“It’s too bad, Josh,” Claire says. “You should have listened to me about remembering. Kai told us that thie was suspicious.”
I cannot pick Kai’s eyes out of the shadows. I direct my gaze at the blurry shadow behind and above Claire.
“Will you not speak to me yourself, Kai?”
The shadow freezes, and then the mechanical voice, so different from the voice that I’ve grown used to caressing my mind, crackles from the gloom.
“I have nothing to say to you. My Josh, my beloved, no longer exists. He has been taken over by ghosts, has already drowned in memory.”
“I’m still here, but now I’m complete.”
“That is a persistent illusion of yours that we cannot seem to correct. I am not the Kai you hate, and you’re not the Josh I love. We are not the sum of our pasts.” Thie pauses. “I hope I will see my Josh soon.”
Thie retreats into the interior of the station, leaving me to my judgment and execution.
Fully aware of the futility, I try to talk to Claire anyway.
“Claire, you know I have to remember.”
Her face looks sad and tired. “You think you’re the only one who’s lost someone? I wasn’t ported until five years ago. I once had a wife. She was like you. Couldn’t let go. Because of her, I was ported and Reborn. But because I made a determined effort to forget, to leave the past alone, they allowed me to keep some memory of her. You, on the other hand, insist on fighting.
“Do you know how many times you’ve been Reborn? It’s because Kai loves … loved you, wished to save most parts of you, that they’ve been so careful with carving as little of you away as possible each time.”
I do not know why Kai wished so fervently to rescue me from myself, to cleanse me of ghosts. Perhaps there are faint echoes of the past in thir mind, that even thie is not aware of, that draw thim to me, that compel thim to try to make me believe the lies so that thie will believe them thimself. To forgive is to forget.
“But thie has finally run out of patience. After this time you’ll remember nothing at all of your life, and so with your crime you’ve consigned more of you, more of those you claim to care about, to die. What good is this vengeance you seek if no one will even remember it happened? The past is gone, Josh. There is no future for the Xenophobes. The Tawnin are here to stay.”
I nod. What she says is true. But just because something is true doesn’t mean you stop struggling.
I imagine myself in the Judgment Ship again. I imagine Kai coming to welcome me home. I imagine our first kiss, innocent, pure, a new beginning. The memory of the smell of flowers and spices.
There is a part of me that loves thim, a part of me that has seen thir soul and craves thir touch. There is a part of me that wants to move on, a part of me that believes in what the Tawnin have to offer. And I, the unified, illusory I, am filled with pity for them.
I turn around and begin to run. The men in front of me wait patiently. There’s nowhere for me to go.
I press the trigger in my hand. Lauren had given it to me before I left. A last gift from my old self, from me to me.
I imagine my spine exploding into a million little pieces a moment before it does. I imagine all the pieces of me, atoms struggling to hold a pattern for a second, to be a coherent illusion.
KEN LIU is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, and a forthcoming third volume), and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker. In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.
Please Undo This Hurt
Seth Dickinson
Ever feel like you care too much? That’s not an option for Dominga, an EMT, or her drinking buddy Nico, who’s tired of hurting people. He wants out. Not suicide, but what if he could erase his whole life? Undo the fact of his birth? Edited by Marco Palmieri.
“A coyote got my cat,” Nico says.
It took me four beers and three shots to open him up. All night he’s been talking about the breakup, what’s-her-name, Yelena I think, and all night I’ve known there’s something else on him, but I didn’t know know—
“Fuck, man.” I catch at his elbow. He’s wearing leather, supple, slick—he’s always mock-hurt when I can’t tell his good jackets from his great ones. “Mandrill?” A better friend wouldn’t have to ask, but I’m drunk, and not so good a friend. “Your cat back home?”
“Poor Mandrill,” Nico says, completely forlorn. “Ah, shit, Dominga. I shouldn’t have left him.”
He only goes to the Lighthouse on empty Sundays, when we can hide in the booths ringed around the halogen beacon. I expect sad nights here. But, man, his cat …
Nico puts his head on my shoulder and makes a broken noise into the side of my neck. I rub his elbow and marvel in a selfish way at how much I care, how full of hurt I am, even after this awful week of dead bikers and domestics and empty space where fucking Jacob used to be. It’s the drink, of course, and tomorrow if we see each other (we won’t) it’ll all be awkward, stilted, an unspoken agreement to forget this moment.
But right now I care.
In a moment he’ll pull himself up, make a joke, buy a round. I know he will, since Nico and I only speak in bars and only when things feel like dogshit. We’ve got nothing in common—I ride ambulances around Queens, call my mom in Laredo every week, shouting Spanish into an old flip phone with a busted speaker. He makes smartphone games in a FiDi studio, imports leather jackets, and serially thinks his way out of perfectly good relationships. But all that difference warms me up sometimes, because (forgive me here, I am drunk) what’s the world worth if you can’t put two strangers together and get them to care? A friendship shouldn’t need anything else.
He doesn’t pull himself up and he doesn’t make a joke.
The lighthouse beam sweeps over us, over the netting around our booth, over Nico’s cramped shoulders and gawky height curled up against me. The light draws grid shadows on his leathered back, as if we’re in an ambulance together, monitors tracing the thready rhythm of Nico’s life. We sit together in the blue fog as the light passes on across empty tables carved with half-finished names.
“I’m really sorry.” He finally pulls away, stiff, frowning. “I’m such a drag tonight. How are things after Jacob?”
I cluck in concern, just like my mom. I have to borrow the sound from her because I want to scream every time I think about fucking Jacob and fucking I’m not ready for your life. “We’re talking about you.”
He grins a fake grin, but he’s so good at it I’m still a little charmed. “We’ve been talking about me forever.”
“You broke up with your girlfriend and lost your cat. You’re having a bad week. As a medical professional, I insist I buy you another round.” Paramedics drink, and lie sometimes. He dumped Yelena out of the blue, “to give her a chance at someone better.” The opposite of what Jacob had done to me. “And we’re going to talk.”
“No.” He looks away. I follow his eyes, tracing the lighthouse beam across the room, where the circle of tables ruptures, broken by some necessity of cleaning or fire code: as if a snake had come up out of the light, slithered through the table mandala, and written something with its passage. “No, I’m done.”
And the way he says that hits me, hits me low, because I recognize it. I have a stupid compassion that does me no good. I am desperate to help the people in my ambulance, the survivors. I can hold them together but I can’t ans
wer the plea I always see in their eyes: Please, God, please, mother of mercy, just let this never have happened. Make it undone. Let me have a world where things like this never come to pass.
“Nico,” I say, “do you feel like you want to hurt yourself?”
He looks at me, and the Lighthouse’s sound system glitches for an instant, harsh and negative, as if we’re listening to the inverse music that fills the space between the song and the meaningless static beneath.
My heart trips, thumps, like the ambulance alarm’s just gone off.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says, eyes round and honest. “I don’t want to get on Twitter and read about all the atrocities I’m complicit in. I don’t want to trick wonderful women into spending a few months figuring out what a shithead I really am. I don’t want to raise little cats to be coyote food. I don’t even want to worry about whether I’m dragging my friends down. I just want to undo all the harm I’ve ever done.”
Make it undone.
In my job I see these awful things—this image always come to me: a cyclist’s skull burst like a watermelon beneath the wheels of a truck he didn’t see. I used to feel like I made a difference in my job. But that was a long time ago.
So I hold to this: As long as I can care about other people, I’m not in burnout. Emotional detachment is a cardinal symptom, you see.
“Did you ever see It’s a Wonderful Life?” I’m trying to lighten the mood. I’ve only read the Wikipedia page.
“Yeah.” Oops. “But I thought it kind of missed the point. What if—” He makes an excited gesture, pointing to an idea. But his eyes are still fixed on the mirror surface of the table, and when he sees himself his jaw works. “What if his angel said, Oh, you’ve done more harm than good; but we all do, that’s life, those are the rules, there’s just more hurt to go around. Why couldn’t he, I forget his name, it doesn’t matter, why couldn’t he say, well, just redact me. Remove the fact of my birth. I’m a good guy, I don’t want to do anyone any harm, so I’m going to opt out. Do you think that’s possible? Not a suicide, that’s selfish, it hurts people. But a really selfless way out?”