In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  “I’m sure you deserved it.”

  She rose from the foamy water to place her hands at the back of my neck. Her bulbous breasts swayed in my vision.

  “Memex implant.” She ticked her tongue. “Unfortunate. Plastic surgery I can excuse. I’m deducting points for the implant.”

  "You helped invent the memex. You're blaming me for using it?"

  "I'm not the booster I once was for the Nexternet. I would expect a man your age and with your technical background to understand."

  “The Nexternet is my job,” I said. “I don’t have much choice.”

  “We all have a choice. Life is nothing but a series of choices.”

  She lowered herself halfway to the hot water. Her hands traveled to my sides and hips. She pinched the rolls of my love handles and stroked my chest.

  "That's enough," I said, pushing her hands off of me.

  “Plastic surgery but no liposuction,” she said. “I can feel your stretch marks through your shirt. They tell me you lost…how much in total?”

  I tried to grab her hands, but they were so soapy, they slipped away.

  “Forty pounds?” she asked.

  “Ten.”

  “A man your size was never ten pounds overweight.” She pinched harder. “I imagine it’s closer to sixty.”

  “Ok, forty pounds.” She pinched again. “Fifty.” Harder. I pushed her hands away. They returned to my hips like mosquitoes and nipped again. “Eighty, goddammit!”

  “And where did you lose eighty pounds? In Japan?”

  I found her wrists. I cuffed them with my hands. I pinned them up against her breasts. Using my weight, I forced her away from me. “Enough.”

  “You’re hurting me.” She tugged not terribly hard.

  “And you’re messing with me,” I said. “There’s no way you can tell by pinching my love handles that I lived in Japan. Who told you that? Who are you working with?”

  “Please let go,” she said in a soft voice, the softest I’d heard from her so far.

  I released her.

  “There is no one alive in America named ‘Naroy’ except you,” she said while massaging her wrists. “It’s not a name common anywhere in the world as far as I can determine. Oh, perhaps it’s Norwegian, perhaps it’s Bulgarian, but I find that unlikely. Naroy is, however, a word in the Japanese vocabulary, and I’ve been told you are not of Japanese extraction.”

  We sat before each other, her nude, me in damp clothes, both of us wet, steamy, and breathing hard. She bit her lower lip. When her front teeth released it, the flesh sprang forward, leaving a rim of oxblood lipstick on her top incisors. She drew close. I could feel her brandied effervescent breath against my chin. It mixed with the steam and the lemongrass oil in the water. It was hell to tame every male urgency clawing at the inside of my skin.

  Brimming with vigor, eager as a bull, and about to make a fool of myself, I sensed a presence in the room. Dana stood at the bath's edge looming over us. She peered down at me with the facial equivalent of a clucked tongue.

  “Your sandwich.” She set beside the bath the plate and a white cloth napkin wrapped around a silver fork. My sandwich was accompanied by six thick-cut potato chips stacked like modern architecture. A modest dressed salad was piled to one side. “Ms. Chancellor, I’m reminding you of your three o’clock.”

  “That’s all for now,” Chancellor said. “Has Gannon called?”

  “No,” the assistant said crisply. She waited for more.

  “Thank you.”

  Dana left us. Once the door closed, Chancellor said, “What do you want, Mr. Naroy?”

  “You summoned me.”

  “What do you want,” she insisted.

  “Answers, for one.”

  “No. What do you want. Money? Prestige? Young women? Or young men, for that matter? What drives you each day?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  The steam and scented oil in the air had softened me up, tenderized me like a steak marinating in red wine. For reasons beyond me, I opened up to her. I said:

  “I want a wife and kids and a house. I mean, I gave up on that years ago, but deep down, that’s what I want.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know that I believe you.”

  “And I’d like to forget,” I said. “I’d like to forget a whole lot of things.”

  “Now it sounds like you’re mocking my question.”

  “It’s all true. Every word.”

  “And what were you doing in Japan?” After I hesitated, she said, “Sounds to me you were escaping your past. Your wife and two-point-three children and the suburban tract house didn’t pan out. I’m guessing they didn’t work out because of that eighty-pound flat tire you were carrying around and a face like a rodeo clown’s, if I’m not mistaken. Sounds to me you left your old identity behind, flew across the Pacific, got some good out of the Japanese diet, and returned a new man with a new face and a new body. And, I’m guessing, a new name.” She stood and, soapy body glistening, took up her cocktail. “How am I doing so far?”

  “You have my attention,” I said.

  “Were you a computer security consultant before you left for Japan? Or when you returned?”

  “You want to see my resume?”

  “I’ve written software since I was fourteen,” she said. “From applications all the way down to the physical layer. Tell me. What would you say is the fundamental concept for computer security?”

  “Don’t trust anything,” I said without hesitation. “Every packet or message that comes across the wire, treat it as a potential threat.”

  “Paranoia, you mean.”

  “I prefer to call it a healthy distrust.”

  “Is distrust your philosophy for computer security? Or for life?”

  “When your brain is hardwired directly to the world’s population, what the hell is the difference?”

  Cassandra drank and approached me slinky-like. “I suppose a man in your line of work has to believe that.”

  “What line of work do you think I’m in?”

  “Do you carry a gun?”

  "Never.”

  “Do you threaten people?” Her voice was husky.

  “Not at all.”

  “You go up against people every day, though, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m in computer security.”

  “You’re in computer security,” she echoed, her voice fading off. “In my day, a computer security consultant was a keyboard monkey. A computer nerd with glasses and a bad haircut watching computer logs scroll up the screen. You don’t seem like that man today. That sounds like the old Naroy.”

  "Japan gave me some confidence in myself."

  "How so?"

  I considered how to word it. "I always felt like a foreigner here in America, but no one else saw it that way. In Japan, it was out in the open. It gave me a breathing room I never had here."

  "It gave you confidence to return to San Francisco and go into computer security."

  “Which used to be about computers,” I said. “Computers that filled up rooms. Then we began carrying them in our pockets. And not long after, we began wearing them on our wrists and on our faces. Soon we were putting the damn things inside our bodies and wiring them to our brains. That’s when computer security quit being about computers and started being about humans and their imperfections.”

  “Which are easier to deal with? Computers or people?”

  “Computers, I understand. People, not as much.”

  “And yet this is the way of life you chose.”

  “Every day a fresh challenge,” I said.

  “And when did you start hurting people?” she asked. “That’s how you get what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “Well, I have a good idea of who hires you, and I have an idea of the kinds of things they’ve hired you to do.” She pressed in closer, as if
that were possible. “You track people down. Threaten them. Break fingers if you have to.”

  "I don't threaten people. Sometimes I have to reveal their secrets, though."

  "I would call that threatening," she said dryly.

  “And I don’t break fingers."

  "Never?"

  "I know people who do.”

  “And what are those people called?”

  “Subcontractors.”

  She pushed away from me. She stood, her glistening nude body speckled with foam, and drank deeply the last of her Napoleon. She retreated to the other end of the bath.

  “Why are you hounding my protégée?” she demanded, still standing.

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  “I want to know why a so-called Mr. C.F. Naroy has been making trips to and from Alcatraz Island,” she demanded. “And I want to know why you’ve been questioning my beloved son and his partner.”

  “I’m not a cash machine,” I told her. “You don’t get to push my buttons and have me dispense whatever information you need.”

  “Why do you want to hurt my son?” she demanded.

  “Gannon? I don’t want to hurt him. I had some questions for him is all.”

  “About?”

  “Ask him yourself,” I said. "I'm betting he knows what I want to talk to him about."

  “I’m hoping to speak to him later today,” she said. “It’s not like him not to return my calls. I've not spoken with him since yesterday afternoon.”

  "About what?"

  "None of your damn business."

  I nodded. “Ok. Now I’ve got a question for you. It’s about your protégée.”

  “And why are you hounding Leigh?”

  “Two years ago, the Chancellor Foundation announced a yearly prize,” I persisted. “A grant to encourage young women to enter the field of computer science. But only one prize has been awarded since then and it was given to the founder’s son’s girlfriend. Included in the grant was living expenses, which I imagine included a luxury Nob Hill apartment a stone’s throw from where I sit. The Foundation doesn’t own that property, though.”

  “The Foundation has free access to the property, and there was no nepotism,” Chancellor said stiffly. “Leigh is a bright woman with a strong knowledge of the computer field. She earned the award on her own merits.”

  “I’ve spoken to her,” I said. “In two minutes, I saw she had everything that it takes to go far in software. I’ve not seen someone so enthusiastic about the Internet since I was her age.”

  “Yet you suggest an impropriety.”

  “No,” I said. “I suggest an ulterior motive.”

  Her furrowed brow made her blank pupils burn.

  “The Chancellor Prize is a sham,” I said. “You awarded it to Leigh Blessing and installed her out at Alcatraz under the guise of a paid internship. It’s impossible to get on that island without an invitation. Even the cops can’t get out there. I think you found a way to plant an informant.”

  She faced away from me. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It looks to me you’re plotting against Dr. Clift and his Old Internet,” I said.

  “His Old Internet,” she said shaking her head. “What do you mean, ‘plotting?’”

  “Data ransoming. Destruction of records. Political embarrassment. Who knows. These memexes we bury in the back of our necks, these things have become proxies for our collective memory. We use them to remember the past. If you were to change the Old Internet, you would be changing our past. Maybe you’d like to change some of your own past.”

  “You are out of your depth,” she said.

  “Am I? Let me give you an example. I lived through the September 11 attacks. You can’t wipe that from the Old Internet and expect everyone to forget that day. There's too much organic memory still out there. If someone broke into the Old Internet and changed a small detail—tweaked the digital memory—that change would become the history we remembered. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania now crashed in West Virginia. Sure, today, there are people who might biologically remember the truth. But when everyone from that generation is dead, who is going to remember otherwise? If you made the right alterations in the right places in the historical record, you could change the past. And if you change the past, you can change the future.”

  She appeared annoyed. “I expected more from you.”

  “You wouldn’t know anything about an engram-locked safe, would you?”

  She scoffed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “There’s not many people involved in this who could install a rabbithole in an engram lock,” I said. “Leigh has that kind of knowledge, though. And you’re an old hand too.”

  “A rabbithole?” she said. “Those are illegal.”

  “And dangerous as hell. They can cook a man’s brain into antifreeze.”

  She grew silent. The pout of worry hung over her chin’s cleft. "Pour me a drink," she said. "Not too sweet." Her pout remained while I made it.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you or Gannon or Leigh,” I said. “Someone has done damage to the Old Internet. I need to find out who.”

  “Breaking into the Old Internet would take considerable specialized knowledge,” she said.

  “The kind of knowledge your protégée Leigh Blessing possesses,” I said.

  “And you too, I gather,” she said. “You could have done this damage.”

  "She also had full access to their internal network when the theft occurred," I said.

  Her pout had twisted into sincere worry. She returned to sitting in the whirlpool. I crossed the bath and sat on the edge opposite her, knee-deep in water.

  “I don’t know anything about rabbitholes,” she announced. “I would never put anyone in such danger.”

  “You installed Leigh Blessing on that island with Clift,” I said. “I’d say there was an element of danger with that.”

  “Elgin Clift is an insatiable tower of bluster,” she said. “But Leigh can manage herself. She’s not a woman to give a man a free pass, if you know what I’m saying. I’m speaking of grave danger. I would never put Leigh or anyone in harm’s way.”

  I kicked my feet through the suds. “Enough of us romping around like water nymphs. I’ve laid my cards on the table. It’s your turn.”

  She exhaled a deep breath. She needed a moment to prepare.

  “You talk about changing history,” she said. “I’ll tell you who really changed history.”

  20.

  “The first web page I visited belonged to a university’s computer science department.” Cassandra Chancellor spoke as though telling an oft-told story. “It was 1992, I believe. Very basic web site. Static pages. No images at all except for the university’s mascot in the top left corner. A screen full of plain text, nothing more. I was accessing the web with a dial-up connection at home. I was using a landline to access the World Wide Web. That dates me, doesn’t it?”

  In 2038, connecting two computers by a telephone line sounded like banging rocks together to light a cigarette.

  “The underlying technology of the web didn’t impress me much,” she continued. “I’d been programming computers for eight or nine years by that point. I understood sockets and TCP/IP and so forth—I knew the basics of the technologies powering the Old Internet. I was also familiar with hypertext and hyperlinking. The World Wide Web was simply a novel way of wiring those technologies together.”

  “Like Orville and Wilbur Wright attaching a gas-powered engine on their glider to make a plane,” I said.

  “The Wrights were pragmatic inventors,” she said, almost scolding me. “What I would give to see more of their commonsense approaches in our world today. In any case, a few days later, I visited that university’s web site again. It had changed. The staff had altered it. Nothing dramatic, mind you. Some piece of information I’d required before was now missing. And when I investigated, I discovered there was no way to recall that miss
ing information. It was gone. That was history being changed. I didn’t care for it one bit.”

  She spoke now with her neck craned back, like a professor might address students. “Do you know of George Drake?”

  “Sure I know him,” I said. “Everyone remembers Antic Corporation.”

  Everyone my age, I should have said. George Drake built the first major Internet company. Pizza delivery and dog food and sunglasses companies built web sites early on, but they viewed the Internet as a side channel to their main business. For Antic, the Internet was its business. George Drake’s gamble of a startup made him a multibillionaire by age thirty-one.

  “I was living with George Drake at the time,” Chancellor told me. “This was before Antic. He’d made a small sum of money on his last startup. I introduced him to the World Wide Web. I’m the reason he started Antic.”

  “He owes you a drink,” I said half-jokingly.

  “He owed me a lot more.” She motioned about the room with a raised finger. I realized she was indicating the Chancellor estate. “The seed money for the Chancellor Foundation came from Antic’s initial stock offering. This house may not seem much from the street, but I keep a staff of twenty or so on the other floors busy with the Foundation’s mission.”

  "What about the money you made creating the Nexternet?"

  "What money?" she said. "I worked on the project pro bono." She breathed out a lungful of nostalgia. "I wanted to be the first person in history to connect their mind to another. I recorded a grad student's emotional response to hearing Kind of Blue. Then I piped their recorded state into my mind." She exhaled another lungful of nostalgic longing. "Hearing those trumpet notes in my mind was like setting foot on the moon."

  "You were the first," I said.

  "But Armstrong returned to terra firma intact," she said, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  “What does this have to do with Alcatraz?” I asked.

  “I planted two ideas in George Drake,” she said. “The first was to start Antic. It made him wealthier than most developing countries. The second earned him nothing. George actually lost money on my second idea. I told George he should start saving a copy of every web site on the planet. I told him it would be like not having old copies of a newspaper to recall the promises a politician had made, or lacking a paper trail when a corporation failed to live up to its end of a contract. We needed some way to recall the past for the sake of the future. And if there was anyone who believed the web was the very heart of the future of the planet, it was George Drake.”