Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  “You’re indeed my flesh and blood . . . when I was young, I also . . . hated my mother.”

  “Grandma? Why? She was so good to you!”

  “Not your Grandma. She was only my stepmother. I’m talking about my real mother. She died . . . when I was a teenager.”

  “What was she like?” I tried to imagine the grandmother I had never seen.

  “Pretty, like you. Bad-tempered, like me.” She finally managed a smile. “They called her a hero not only because she had survived, and not only because she was among the first to be implanted with a MAD . . . When she had decided to have a child, the world had already started to collapse. Your grandfather had lost all hope and wanted to abort the baby. But she insisted on having me . . . ”

  “Why did she want a child so much?”

  “I couldn’t understand it, either, not until I was pregnant with you. Then I understood that feeling. Though the Catastrophe had been over by then, every day, I lived in fear, wondering whether it was the right thing to do to bring you into this mess of a world. What little sleep I got was filled with nightmares. Everyone tried to talk me out of it, but, in the end, I made the same decision she had.”

  I understood what my mother wanted to say but didn’t.

  “My father didn’t want me. Am I right?”

  My mother’s eyes began to wander, as though she couldn’t find anything on which to fix her gaze. She looked outside the window.

  “Your father was a good man. But . . . he had seen so much that terrorized him . . . ” Like me, she wasn’t any good at lying.

  “Maybe he was right,” I said, keeping my voice cold.

  “No! You don’t understand!” My mother’s voice was hot, searing. “Every time I see you, it’s like I see the past that had been wiped away from me and your father. You’re the proof that we were alive. I’ve never regretted that decision.”

  I felt like crying.

  We fell silent together. In the surviving pieces of this family history was a heart-breaking story. Much of it wasn’t motivated by love, but survival. Doctor Qing was right: I understood my mother too little. She had been molded by too many stories that had been forgotten, that had been erased, but I blamed everything on her, as though she had become the way she was by an act of conscious will. I felt apologetic.

  The smell in the room became intolerable; I needed fresh air.

  “Rest well. I’ll come see you again.” I got up and gently patted the back of her hand. But she grabbed me and held on. In my memory, my mother had never touched me except to hit me.

  “I had a dream . . . It was so dark, so frightening. I dreamt that I was a child again . . . ” Her breath was shallow, fast, her gaze anxious and without focus. Her dry, thin fingers refused to let go.

  We shared the same dream. This was far more frightening than the dream itself.

  “It’s only a dream,” I said gently, trying to comfort her. I combed through her thinning, gray hair.

  “So dark . . . so dark . . . ” My mother muttered, as though she had turned into the little girl in the dream.

  I thought, Maybe it’s possible for me to become a good mother.

  The blindfold was very tight, and I couldn’t see anything. My hand rested on Doctor Qing’s shoulder. As a blind woman, she was skilled at leading another.

  I took each step with care, as though walking into the depth of the night sky. When deprived of sight, your ears and nose became especially sensitive. I could hear tiny teeth grinding in invisible corners; I could detect the stench of rotting garbage, mixed with the sweet, rusty scent of metal, and the remnants of the complex compounds in essential oils lingering on Doctor Qing.

  She thought I was the one they had been seeking.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “The less you know, the better,” she said.

  After a long journey during which we passed several cramped, tight corners, the air smelled fresh again. We had arrived.

  “Sorry, but we can’t take off the blindfold just yet.” The man’s voice was flat, without a trace of regional accent.

  I nodded, indicating that it was all right.

  “I need to thank you. You’re without a doubt the best subject. But I hope you understand that the experiment is not without risks. If you want to back out, there’s still enough time.”

  I shook my head. “I just want to know: why me?” I meant not only for this experiment, but also the rest of my life.

  He laughed. The sound was open, frank.

  “Remember your dream? It’s not a dream at all, but the remnants of memory. It came not from your mother, but your grandmother.”

  “How is that possible? You’re telling me that memory can be inherited?”

  “I concede that this is a bit hard to believe . . . ” He paused, as though pondering how to explain.

  It was that damned epigenetic memory again. At least I wasn’t completely ignorant anymore.

  Diet, the environment, and drugs can all cause DNA to methylate, affecting genetic expression. While the DNA sequences are not altered, these methylation results can be inherited. Moreover, certain traumatic events, such as childhood neglect, abuse, surviving a massacre, drug abuse, or mental breakdown, can also affect epigenetics. In other words, the experiences of our most recent generations of ancestors can leave wounds in our DNA in the form of methylation patterns. Even if those experiences have long been forgotten, and the bodies that had experienced them long gone, the scars, passed on through bloodlines, become part of our lives.

  Take my mother: she inherited not only my grandmother’s beautiful features, but also her apathy, irritability, and nervousness. These features then influenced the next generation—me. It was like a row of collapsing dominoes without end.

  “You’re not the only victim.” Doctor Qing placed her hand on my shoulder: warm, strong, comforting, the way I imagined how a mother’s touch would feel. “Many have experienced similar dreams . . . ”

  “That means . . . ” I tried to understand what this implied. “Their ancestors all shared the same experience, like . . . the Catastrophe?”

  The truth was so obvious.

  “The timing works out,” the man said. “But no one knows exactly what happened. All the official records describe the Catastrophe vaguely as nothing more than a natural disaster.”

  “And everyone who lived through it had their memories erased by MAD, just like my grandmother.” My body began to tremble uncontrollably.

  “Memories imbued with too much pain cannot be erased. They are etched into our DNA through methylation, and are passed onto the next generation. This is why we need you.”

  “But I don’t remember anything . . . ”

  “Not you, but your body.” As Doctor Qing spoke, I seemed to smell the neroli oil again, soothing my sorrow. “Remember what I told you the other day? A certain essential oil is like a key, and can unlock the box of your memories. The chemical ingredients in the oil can demethylate specific DNA sequences, freeing the fragments of memory.”

  I recalled the first time I saw her. It wasn’t a comfortable experience.

  “We want to collect as many of these broken bits of memory as possible and decipher their meaning,” the man said. “With them, we can piece together the truth about the Catastrophe, and stop the scars of history from extending into the future. You will become a hero.”

  The corners of my lips twitched, but I said nothing. I knew I was no hero.

  Memory is like an onion. The different sensory input sources correspond to different layers. Visual memories are the outermost layer: easiest to trigger, and easiest to be erased. When I used MAD to weaken the memories of my mother, the process stirred up all the pieces of the past. Like a long montage, I was forced to relive through everything, and only then could the emotional content, buried deep within, be stripped away. That sinful pleasure felt like scratching a wound into a numbed arm.

  I looked forward to the sensation of those painful memories, inherited fr
om my grandmother, exploding into joyful fireworks in my mind.

  I lay down. A harness secured my neck and head, and a mask was put over my face. I smelled a familiar, grassy fragrance: White Angelica, the oil of angels. The demethylation compound was about to be injected into my brain.

  The countdown began in my ear: five, four, three . . .

  Something shattered in my brain.

  I was wrong. The fragments of memory did not manifest visually, but rather were like an epic recited by a blind bard. I experienced condensed emotions, feelings, but no concrete scenes. The long passage of time and the multiple generations in between meant that the original memories had become blurred, twisted, broken, and were now mixed with the real memories of my mother and me, as well as the official explanations and propaganda about the Catastrophe. History rewrote memory, and memory recreated history. I could no longer tell what was real and what was not. Judged by emotional impact, they were equally effective.

  But they were wrong, too. The dream they had been so interested in wasn’t a real memory. It was more accurate to call it a side effect of the Catastrophe, a psychological wound suffered during pregnancy, extreme anxiety at the possibility of losing a child. Even though my grandmother had no idea back then what her unborn daughter would look like, like all parents, she had imagined a person and projected her fears onto it.

  Those fears were then etched in my mother’s genome, and, like family lore, passed on from generation to generation.

  They were the jewels my mother and I had hidden inside the dark box. Now that the box had been forcefully opened up, they lay exposed to bright sunlight.

  Like a castle made of sand, they fell apart in the strong wind.

  It was MAD. The released fragments of memory were rapidly indexed, recorded, and then erased by MAD. I understood their intent. No matter who was affected, this was the safest path. Powerful, detailed, unbearably painful memories flowed towards the future like time itself, dissolving the past.

  A pang of fear seized me. The dream was perhaps the only thing in the world that connected my mother to me, the only thing that surpassed blood and familial ties, the only constant that didn’t change.

  And it was now gone.

  I was going to forget everything. That was how history healed itself.

  . . . three, two, one, say cheese!

  In the picture, my mother looked as serious and rigid as ever, only the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. I was holding little Nuo, who had just turned one. Both of us had wide grins.

  “Mom, look at you! You never smile.” I scolded her half-heartedly. After a long regimen of medicine and physical therapy, my mother was recovering well. But sometimes, her facial muscles still didn’t entirely obey her will.

  “I was smiling. You think I was crying?” she argued.

  “Look at Nuo. Now that’s a smile.” I played with the baby. Her lips opened in a toothless grin as she cooed.

  “She’s like you. When you were little, you were just this way. Like you had no care in the world.”

  “You must be remembering it wrong. I didn’t like to smile when I was little.”

  “I gave birth to you! You think I wouldn’t remember that?”

  My mother had changed. Her odd moods and ill temper had disappeared so completely that I questioned my memory. I could only attribute it to the demethylation treatments. She had become optimistic, cheerful, outgoing. If it weren’t for her bad legs, she would be holding Nuo twenty-four hours a day.

  Maybe she wasn’t a good mother, but she is a good grandmother.

  I was incredibly busy. While caring for Nuo, I also studied every topic related to caring for a newborn: diet, physical exercise, early mental stimulation. Every evening, I massaged her whole body with a special type of baby oil. The doctor told me that touch was one of the most important sources of sensory input for the baby’s neural development, and it was also a way to bring her and me closer.

  She would not have an opportunity to erase me from her memory. The MAD had been abolished. I belonged to the last generation who would have such implants. After my death, perhaps they would build a museum to commemorate pathetic creatures like me whose skulls had been outfitted with a metal box.

  The official explanation for the Catastrophe also changed. It now became harder to understand, more ambiguous. But in folklore, there were dozens of competing versions of the Catastrophe, all vivid and sensational. Sometimes, I felt as if I knew something, but then I couldn’t remember any of it. That was fine. Too many things had changed. Peopled needed time to adjust.

  I hummed a lullaby, trying to get Nuo to sleep. Her breathing became even and slow. I kissed her forehead. The milky aroma mixed with the fragrance of rose smelled angelic.

  From time to time, she twitched, as though dreaming of something. If I held out my finger, she would clutch it tightly.

  I wanted to know if I was in her dream.

  Whatever she dreamed, as long as it belonged only to her and wasn’t a repeat of someone else’s dream, even her mother’s, I imagined it was the sweetest dream possible.

  What I’ve Seen With Your Eyes

  By Jason K. Chapman

  “So, Ms. Wei,” Detective Perez said. “Your brother was killed by a Yeti. With a knife.”

  Lisa Wei glanced around the 983rd Precinct. It was a dozen desks and a five-foot-square cage crammed into an old bodega. Only five of the desks were occupied, though. That made the room feel spacious. She shifted in the cracked, plastic chair next to Perez’s desk, reaching down to slide her purse and the old gym bag underneath it. On the walls, signs and a scrolling marquee insisted that ForGen Motors had proudly sponsored the 983rd.

  “That’s what I saw,” Lisa said. “A pale blue one—the Yeti, not the knife—with a unicorn horn.”

  The detective nodded, but didn’t note anything on his tablet. Instead, he stared at her face. “Would you please remove your sunglasses,” he said.

  She hesitated. The man had city written all over him—no ads on his clean, crisp clothes; no desperate sideways glances at the trash can. He hadn’t stood in a crowded alley at midnight waiting for the hash houses to close so he could kick and claw his way to a choice spot at the dumpster buffet. He hadn’t smiled and pretended not to notice as his older brother wiped the grime from a misshapen cupcake he’d scored from behind the bakery on his fourteenth birthday.

  No. He just wanted to see the poor little exurb girl’s eyes and say, “There, but for a steady paycheck, an education, and parents who could afford to give a flying fuck, go I.” She took the glasses off and stared at him defiantly.

  To his credit, he didn’t even twitch. Most city people at least showed some kind of reaction when they saw the glittery gold C# logo of Captain Sharp’s GhotiBurgers staring at them.

  “GhotiBurgers,” he said. He pronounced it “goaty.”

  “Fish,” Lisa said.

  “Not really.” The detective got a sour look on his face. “They grow that stuff in a vat.” He shrugged and pointed to the wall. “That poster in the middle, below the ForGen sign. What’s it say?”

  She barely glanced at it. “It’s a Captain Sharp’s ad,” she said. “GhotiNuggets are half off this week with a large soda.”

  “So your eyes are net-connected.”

  “Of course,” Lisa said. “That’s how FedMed works. Why? What do you see there?”

  Perez glanced up at the sign. “Some cologne that’s supposed to make me rich and beautiful.”

  “City ads, then.”

  “How so?”

  “No one tries to sell beauty to exurbs,” she said. “We can’t relate.”

  It had been decades since the suburban experiment finally failed and people flocked back into the cities. They built, rebuilt, managed, and mangled, tearing down everything to set up their livable, loveable urban paradises, where the old dreams of picket fences and split-level ranches were reborn as the new ideals of sidewalk cafés and gleaming high-rises.

  Bu
t the rubble had to fall somewhere.

  These remade cities were ringed with rocky, exurban shoals, where the displaced and dispossessed fetched up to mingle with the shipwrecked souls who didn’t quite have what it took to make it all the way onto the island.

  “I live in the Ex,” Perez said.

  Lisa laughed. “No, you don’t.”

  He gave her a pair of cross streets as if showing her a medal.

  “That’s ex-Ex,” she said. “What do they call it? Transitional?”

  “Not when I was growing up,” he said.

  Lisa studied his face. Maybe he was lying. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. Whatever Ex-cred he might claim, he was an urbie, now.

  Lisa was just seven years old when she learned about growing up. She huddled on her bed, an old sofa cushion shoved in the corner of a one-room apartment. She still had her own eyes then, but they were nearly useless. She clutched her old cracked-glass tablet to her chest, crying in frustration because she couldn’t read anymore.

  Eddie came home from whatever teenage brothers did to keep the rent paid and the two of them fed. He crossed the tiny apartment in a dozen quick steps and sat down next to her, holding her close.

  “What’s the matter, Little One?” he said.

  She leaned against him. “I couldn’t read,” she said. “No matter how big I made the letters.”

  “Isn’t the audio working?”

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “Not like when you read to me. Or Mama.”

  Eddie took a deep, shuddery breath and let it out slowly. His heart thumped loudly in Lisa’s ear. “I told you,” he said. “I don’t think Mama’s coming home.”

  “I know.” Lisa wiped away a tear that was running across the bridge of her nose. “It’s because I can’t see.”

  Eddie kissed her on the top of the head. “She was never very strong,” he said.

  She managed a tiny smile. She knew this game. “Not like us, right?”

  “Toughest pair in the Ex,” he said.

  “Cuz we can do anything.”

  “With nothing.”

  “And like it!” they finished together.