Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Annotation

  To escape his past, Keller has become an Eye—an all-seeing, unfeeling human video recorder. But his detachment fails when he meets Teresa, and he becomes involved in murder, smuggling and worse.

  Memory Wire by Robert Charles Wilson

  PART 1 BURIED HISTORY

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Because of the monomolecular wires twined deep into his cerebral cortex, Raymond Keller’s memories often announced themselves as scents. He would smell dust and concrete and think, seconds later, of the water-rationed conduit suburb in which he had spent his childhood. Gasoline, he would think, and be back in his father’s oily garage, chain-lifting an antique internal combustion engine.

  Tonight—standing in the kitchen of his Los Angeles apartment with a glass of water in his hand—he smelled the hot granular earth of a manioc field in Brazil, and knew the memory would be a bad one.

  He put aside the glass with a deliberate motion and moved to the translucent outer wall of the living room. The sky beyond it was dark and starless; across the long bow of the harbor, the scattered lights of the boat barrios flickered.

  The memory trick was one side effect of his Angel wiring. There were others, mostly minor. He had grown accustomed to it, or so he told himself. The biosynthetic wires grown under his skull were microscopic and immunosuppressive; in terms of tissue displacement or body weight, they hardly existed. But, Keller thought moodily, the body knows. Leiberman, the Network M.D., had told him so. “The imperial flesh,” Leiberman had said. “Poke it, it responds.”

  He closed his eyes and sighed.

  In the flickering retinal darkness, bright lines of tracer fire stitched out.

  Helpless, he watched Megan Lindsey die one more time.

  Keller was periodically employed as a Recording Angel by the news and documentary arm of the largest satellite video network operating out of the western United States. In the course of his work he had sold burned-out krytrons in the Oslo weapons market, he had endured the terrors of the joychip underground. But he knew what he guessed most Angels knew: the real terrors are internal.

  Wu-nien, he told himself. No-thought. In the silence of his apartment, the memory fading—after midnight now —he practiced the lonely rigors of Angel discipline.

  When he had achieved a measure of calm, he emptied the card windows of his wallet and placed the plastic rectangles side by side on the slab of smoked glass that was the surface of his coffee table.

  Pacific Credit Exchange, the Military Registrar, California DMV. A handful more. Some of them featured his photo in two or three dimensions: a man in his mid-thirties frowning out from the photographs with an expression Megan had once described as “the blessed innocence of failed comprehension.” He wore nonprescription eyeglasses and his hair was cut back to stubble. The name embossed or printed on each card was Grossman, William Francis.

  The cards were insubstantial, Keller thought: soap bubbles. A year ago they had meant a good deal to him. They had represented a new life, a new identity, yet another chance to outrun the juggernaut of his past. When the Network issued him the ID, part payment for his dangerous and prolonged penetration of the joychip covens, Keller had in effect invented William Grossman: a mild, inoffensive man with modest pleasures and no ambitions. He had created a past for him—parents, a school, lovers. He had coached himself in this artificial history until he was convinced he could in some sense become William Francis Grossman, and for months it seemed to work. He told the Network he didn’t work for them anymore.

  For a time it seemed as if he had found a way back into the world.

  But lately, gazing out the walls of Grossman’s luxury apartment at the coastline stretching north to the Santa Monicas, he had felt the old fears creeping back. And now—terrible memories still flickering in the lights of the tidal barrios—he knew it was the end of Grossman.

  He stacked the cards carefully, picked them up, fanned them out. They were artificial and a cheat.

  Tomorrow, he thought, I will burn them.

  He would go back to the Network. He would light up the wires in his head. He would be an Angel again.

  2. In the morning Keller traveled to the Network building in the city core and met his contact there, an independent producer named Vasquez. Vasquez sat in a large private office with polarized windows and vertical blinds, and the angle of vision the windows allowed was intentionally oblique, so that one saw only the blueness of the ocean and not the shabby patchwork of the Floats.

  Vasquez regarded him with a mild curiosity and said, “I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

  The work Keller did was sublegal, his contacts with the Network strictly sub rosa. He worked without contract, and so he was, to a degree, at the mercy of Vasquez. But he was also good at his work; he knew it; Vasquez knew it. “I changed my mind,” he said.

  Keller outlined the proposition his friend Byron Ostler had made him a couple of weeks ago.

  The Network executive nodded. At first, as Keller spoke, Vasquez seemed excited; then a patina of concern came across his face. “What you’re proposing,” he said, “would be dangerous.”

  Keller admitted it would be.

  “Maybe more dangerous than you think,” Vasquez persisted. “Not everybody can be bought off. There are too many competing interests. The military, the government, the Brazilians—”

  “I appreciate that. I can handle it.” Keller sat forward in his chair. “No one has footage like this. You know how valuable it would be.”

  They talked a while longer. As Vasquez relented, his excitement crept back. Keller had known it would: Vasquez was already embarked on an investigation of the oneirolith trade and the deal was too tempting to refuse. Keller held out for a little more money than he ordinarily received; Vasquez agreed easily.

  He was committed now. No pulling out. The idea was faintly but suddenly disturbing.

  Vasquez withdrew a notepad from his desk, scribbled on it, lifted the sheet of paper and handed it across the desk. “Give this to Leiberman. Go this afternoon. He’ll make time for you. I’ll arrange it.”

  Keller nodded.

  The appointment with Leiberman was for three. At lunch Keller met Byron Ostler at a waterfront cafe down the coast highway, a high patio overlooking the boat barrios, barcos viviendas in Gypsy colors sprawling between the mainland and the distant tidal dam. Byron was alone, waiting. But he would have been impossible to miss even in a crowded room. His thick archaic eyeglasses, round as coins, sat on his pinched face like a challenge or a rebuke. His hair fell down over his shoulders in white cascades. He wore an old khaki jacket threadbare at the collar and loose around his narrow throat. He looked, Keller thought with some amusement, like a painting by El Greco of a consumptive jockey.

  “Ray,” Byron said, and the smile widened fractionally.

  “I’m still Grossman,” Keller said. “Oh?”

  “For a few hours.” He pulled up a chair. “So it’s on? You’re making the trip?”

  “Looks that way,” Keller said. Byron chuckled softly.

  Keller ordered a sandwich from the bored day waitress. “Something’s funny?”

  “You,” Byron said. “Me. That there’s two of us crazy enough to go back.”

  “You said it was arranged. You said—”

  “I know. It is. Safe passage guaranteed. Still… there’s this irony in it.”

  Byron had a right to talk. Byron had been there. Byron had been Keller’s platoon Angel all those years ago; he would show you—if he was in the mood—the pale blue Eye tattoo on his skinny forearm, washed over with blond hair now, fading but intact.

  Keller, after the war, had had his own tattoo
removed. Leiberman had performed the skin graft. It was a good job: only a rigorous microscan would reveal the seams. Byron was a ’lith chemist long since gone underground out in the Floats; he could afford to keep his Eye insignia. Keller, a private Angel, could not.

  Both of us outlaws, Keller thought. But so different.

  “It’s only a place,” Keller said.

  “The Basin,” Byron said. “The River—Rio Mar, the River Sea. The Amazon, Ray. Heart of Weirdness.”

  Keller smiled steadily. “Bullshit.”

  “You plugged in yet?”

  “Not for a couple of hours.”

  “So… your last meal as a human being.”

  The waitress brought his sandwich, and Keller looked at it without enthusiasm. “Is that how you think of it?”

  “I did your job once.”

  “Yours is better?” He shrugged.

  “Drug pusher,” Keller said. “Not exactly.”

  Keller ate, and Byron continued to grin until Keller began to find the grin an irritation, a kind of insult. It is bullshit, he thought suddenly—the grin, the swagger, the faded khaki; all of it, all hype.

  “Don’t repress,” Byron said. “Tell me what you’re gritting your teeth about.”

  Because he was irritated, and because the friendship was old enough and sturdy enough, he did so.

  “Maybe,” Byron conceded. “Maybe I’m a fake. You include yourself in that, Ray? The walking eye? The man who had his humanity shot off in the war?”

  Keller winced. “I include myself,” he said.

  “But of course. Objectivity—yes? How could you not include yourself?”

  “At least you don’t deny it.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Byron said. “But you’re wrong, you know, if you believe that about Teresa.”

  “I haven’t met Teresa.”

  “It’s for her sake. All this is for her sake.”

  Keller put his card in the table slot and stood up.

  “Think about it,” Byron said, lost now in some thought of his own. “Everything moves in circles. The Wheel, Ray. Everything returns.”

  3. Leiberman’s office was a shabbily genteel building in the Hollywood Hills, pastel stucco and a discreet sign: it could be mistaken for an abortion clinic. It was, of course, much more than that. Leiberman was the Network’s neurotechnician of last resort: implanting vapid actors with digital prompters to whisper their dialogue to them; boosting their stage presence or neutralizing their stage fright with his pharmacopoeia of narrow-gauge psychochemicals; sometimes installing AV blanks for Angels like Keller… performing any medical work that must not suffer the scrutiny of the legal guard dogs. In Leiberman’s office no real records were kept; no names, no credit lines, no phone numbers.

  Inside, Leiberman’s secretary smiled at him. He handed her the note, his passport. Her eyes glittered icily. “Go on in,” she said.

  The inner office was Leiberman’s workroom, a glass-and-chromium chamber, surgical instruments dangling on coiled wires from the ceiling. Leiberman greeted him and ushered him to a chair. Leiberman was plump, bald, grossly physical; his surgical smock was tight across his belly. “This shouldn’t take long,” he said. “Remove your shirt. Sit.”

  The access socket was embedded between Keller’s shoulders next to the spine, a couple of millimeters under the derma. “Army workmanship,” Leiberman clucked, exposing and sponging that bit of metal; but it was only professional rhetoric: the socket did its job. On his first visit, Leiberman had run a deep neurological scan and admitted that the actual wirework was excellent: biosynthetic tendrils much thinner than hairs sampling Keller’s visual cortex, his auditory ganglia. He had never needed upgrading or repair. Leiberman’s job was to seal and unseal the skin, keep the socket sterile, and install a passive AV memory to store Keller’s data.

  “Fine new ones these days,” Leiberman said. He removed the AV memory from a sterile perspex pack. It was smaller than Keller remembered, a snowflake between the prongs of Leiberman’s tweezers. “You can get up to two years continuous realtime on one of these—audio and video. And it’s sturdier into the bargain. New materials. Well, you know.”

  Keller sat with his head immobilized in a skull clamp while Leiberman worked. Installing the memory, the testing of it, sent little back-EMF blips surging into Keller’s brain. His visual cortex lit up: impossible mandalas blossomed and flared on his eyelids. The subdued anger that had been riding him since lunch began abruptly to fade. Surrendering to the process, he thought, that was what it was all about. It was surrender that had saved him. In this cool ice envelope, Camera Eye, Recording Angel, he was preserved from the ravages of real memory.

  He relaxed and watched the misfiring of his visual ganglia, cascades of blue electric fire. The vision consumed all of Keller’s attention until Leiberman withdrew his tools and the surgical studio snapped back into focus.

  “You’re fixed,” Leiberman said.

  He was. He felt it. Nothing specific, simply an aura of heightened awareness that was not even physiological: only the knowledge that he was an Angel again, that everything he saw and heard was being quietly recorded on the molecular memory Leiberman had installed.

  He turned to look at the neurosurgeon, and it was a different motion now, a pan-and-sweep, coolly professional.

  Leiberman frowned. “Don’t stare,” he said. “It’s impolite.”

  4. Keller’s neural harness had been installed at an Army staging base in Santarem during the long Brazilian conflict. Keller had been shipped in from frontline action along the contested highway BR-364 in Rondonia, in a condition the military doctors called “emotional dysfunction.” He had surprised them by asking for Angel duty.

  Every combat unit had an Angel. It was Army policy. The Angel performed essentially the same role in an infantry platoon that the black box, the flight recorder, performed in the cockpit of a passenger airliner—“box” was one of the politer epithets for a Recording Angel. Byron Ostler, Keller’s own platoon Angel, had explained it to him one time. Because an Angel was in effect the ultimate intelligence unit, carrying an unimpeachable record of combat action, Angels were entitled to certain benefits. They were not obliged to do heavy physical work. In combat they were scrupulously defended by their fellow soldiers. They wore special protective clothing, and other people humped their supplies for them.

  They were shunned, of course, socially. But they were also exempt from the hard equations of triage: it was Med Corps policy that Recording Angels received priority medical attention.

  If they died, their bodies were recovered.

  In all these customs and regulations there was no concern for the individual Angel, only for his neural harness, his AV memory, his ultimate debrief ability… but that was okay, Keller thought. That was just Army.

  The hospital at Santarem was a very loose unit. The nurses were civilians, the doctors volunteers. The building was makeshift, an ambling single-story structure electronically sealed against insect traffic. Keller lay in a ward with twenty strangers united by their fear of the impending surgery. They read American paperbacks or looked at the Portuguese sex comics that arrived in box loads from Sao Paulo every Tuesday. They listened to the drone of troop carriers and the white hiss of the air-conditioning; they played cards. One by one they were wheeled away and came back wired.

  Keller had known it was dangerous surgery. They all knew. The army did it a dozen times daily in installations like this, but still it was dangerous. It could not be otherwise, messing with your brain like that. The brain, Keller thought, was delicate, fragile. Thread it with those wires and you could lose something. Before he volunteered for Angel duty, Keller had purloined a medical text and checked it out. Theoretically it was simple: the “wires” were living bio-synthetic tissue, designed to grow unobtrusively into the brain, built with tropisms that would carry them deep into the visual cortex. An automatic proces
s. But the book referred also to the symptomology of implant failure, a long and daunting list. Partial or total loss of the visual field; dysphasia, aphasia; disorientation, memory loss; impairment of limbic function; flattening or disturbance of emotional affect. His palms dampened at the thought. Still, he had been deemed suitable for this work and had—it was elective—volunteered.

  “It’s hard work,” the medics warned him. “It’s not a free ride. Don’t even think it. If you’re an Angel, there’s an attitude you have to cultivate. Wu-nien. You know what that means, Mr. Keller? It means you’re a machine. You don’t think, you look. You don’t look where you want, you look where it matters. You are a camera, right? You’re not there to do the work. You are the work.”

  Keller had understood perfectly. Byron had already taught him a little Angel Zen. To see without desire. The perfect mirror.

  “You won’t be Raymond Keller anymore. What you want, what you care about, you have to learn to leave it all behind. You’re a pair of eyes, a pair of ears. That’s all.”

  He thought it sounded pretty good.

  That night, for the first time in a month, he slept without dreaming. In the morning they wheeled him into surgery.

  5. Back in Grossman’s apartment Keller fixed himself a light meal. He needed to drop a few pounds, make himself lean, shed Grossman like a skin. When he had eaten, he gathered up the contents of the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, put them all into two shopping bags, sealed the bags, and carried them down the hallway to the building’s communal annihilator. They vanished into the metal chute in a puff of actinic light. Good-bye, Grossman.

  He thought about burning his cards, decided to postpone the ritual. First he would call Lee Anne.

  A sex agency had supplied him with Lee Anne. Buying sex on credit had been a novelty for him, but it seemed like something Grossman might do. He had hired Lee Anne on a short-term contract and expanded it to long.