by A A Woods
It’s amazing how much can change in six months, I think, folding my hands over my knees.
Where once her energies had their crosshairs fixed on creation, they now swirl obsessively around what could have been. What once was. The only fires left in her eyes are the ghostly embers of Zhu, of a time when our family was whole and strong and perfect.
What about me? I wish I could shout. He might be gone, but I’m still here. Doesn’t that matter to you at all?
But I don’t.
What good would it do?
I exhale. “Mom, let’s—”
Knuckles rap against the door. My voice cuts off.
“I’ll get it—”
“Stay there,” I interrupt, slicing my hand in Mom’s direction. The woman I used to know would have laughed at the boldness of a anyone trying to give her orders. She would have thrown her arm out in a mock-salute or grabbed me around the waist.
But all she does is sink back down as the cushions exhale around her.
I step up to the door—an easy feat in our cramped living room. “Who is it?”
“I saw your bike land. Open up!”
My fists clench against my thighs, wishing I could steal a moment to compose myself. But our landlord isn’t exactly a patient man.
I press the button to open the door. It squeaks on the hinges, modern enough to slide open on command but ancient enough to complain while doing so. A whoosh of air hits my face, filled with the smell of falafel and sweat.
“Mr. Consalos, I’m sorry I’m late—”
He cuts me off. “This is the third time this year, Miss Sidana.”
“I know.”
“I tell you, if this happens again—”
“And I told you I’d have it soon.”
I force myself to stand tall, hoping that my Fuzz Specs meet his eyes as I lift my chin.
To my surprise, he sighs. “I like you, girl. You might be strange, but you remind me of my daughters.” He sighs again and I smell breath mints barely covering the distinct scent of cabbages. “But I cannot let this keep happening. I have a building to run, and this—” I imagine him gesturing to the mess, to my mother plugged in like a forgotten appliance, to my own banded cable “— is not good for business. You understand?”
I grit my teeth.
The public’s tolerance of ‘divergent lifestyles’ is quickly thinning as the number of memory addicts spirals out of control. My mother isn’t the only one who’s abandoned her job, her art, her only remaining child, to exist in a life that isn’t hers anymore. Some, like her, get lost in their own memories, trapped in a web of nostalgia and loss. Others sink into the sticky-sweet recollections of others. Celebrities, travelers, daredevils, fantastical characters living in CGI worlds. For every channel there are a hundred people addicted to it. A hundred people no longer contributing. And after the new ProRec anti-addiction campaign, the public’s view of MemHeads—and, by extension, Gamers—is only growing harsher.
I can’t blame them.
If the citizens of Nova ever started to feel sympathy for the addicts, if they acknowledged what could happen to them every time they plugged in, they’d have to assess the risk. Consider if cables are really worth it. I wonder what would happen to ProRec’s sprawling, omniscient reach if that happened.
But understanding the prejudice doesn’t make it easier to face Mr. Consalos.
“I understand.” The words feel like treason, like poison on my tongue. But I force them out. Our landlord might be noisy and demanding and biased, but he takes rent in untraceable virts and doesn’t ask questions. “I’ll have the money to you tomorrow.”
“Very good.” He pauses and I feel him shift. Is he looking at my mother, at the mess of our apartment? I swallow my rage and press my shaking fists against my hips. “Is she…?”
“She’s fine.”
“There is a new clinic, I hear. Up in mid-town.”
In spite of everything, my lips twitch. What a strange man, to be knocking my door down demanding rent and in the next sentence offering advice for expensive mid-town treatments.
“I have it under control,” I lie.
“Happened to my cousin. Very sad. Man disappeared two months ago. Left two sons and a fish tank.” Mr. Consalos tsked. “People should be more careful. There are smoke and mirrors behind that company, mark my words.”
Consider them marked, I think, nodding as Mr. Consalos lumbers off with another tsking sound.
I close the door behind him and lean my forehead on it as Pixel rubs against my jeans. For a moment, I just breathe. Let the simple inhale and exhale smooth over the rough edges of my temper.
A tiny, traitorous voice reminds me how easy it would be to solve this. After all, Project Recollection’s payout is waiting, gathering dust in some unreachable account. A hefty sum that’s supposed to make up for the loss of my vision. I think of the other girls and boys from ProRec’s Kinder Program, clustered in examination rooms, grinning bravely at one another. Our parents were eager to install our IRIS cables young. Give us maximum neural adaptation. Maximum advantage. When the technicians warned Mom of a potential one percent failure rate, she’d insisted it was worth it. That it wouldn’t happen to me.
Instead of a bright new future, I got unbroken darkness and a generous monthly stipend for the rest of my life.
I haven’t had access to that money since Zhu started working on my cable. Back then it hadn’t seemed like much of a sacrifice, giving up the payments in exchange for Zhu’s secretive updates and the semblance of vision. After all, our parents had everything under control. Someone else was providing for us.
But now?
I can’t afford to let the temptation take root. If I go to a ProRec clinic, some kind, well-dressed wireologist will smile and plug me in, making small talk as they scour my programming, hunting for viruses and malware. Under the guise of cleaning my code, they’ll pick apart my cable like they did with Mom and Dad, gathering more evidence against my brother.
Never let them see what I did, little tiger.
Those were Zhu’s last words to me the night before he disappeared, his final command. He’d said them after our normal evening ritual of him tinkering with my cable, tweaking the code that he wrote to help me see through machines. I’d thought nothing of it at the time, just another warning to keep the alterations he’d been making secret.
But looking back, I see now it was different.
Urgent.
He wasn’t just talking about the update that lets me stretch my mind into external devices. This was something else.
Something dangerous.
If ProRec gets into my head, they’ll find whatever he hid there. And I can’t let them. Project Recollection has stolen my family, my brother, my old life. I won’t let them have this too.
I won’t let them take away my chance to find him.
Where are you, Zhu? I think, bringing one fist to rest against the doorframe.
But the only answer I get is the sound of his cat purring and my mother’s shallow breathing as she re-enters her memories with a sigh of contentment, leaving me in a world where I am alone.
Tora
Tuesday, September 18th, 2195
6:53 A.M. EST
On her better days, Mom accuses my room of being a hovel. Cramped and cluttered, with the debris of my chaotic life shoved into the corners like snow cleared off a road, an outsider might be amazed that I can navigate it. To anyone else, the tiny windowless cell would be a minefield of dangers waiting to catch their toes, tangle their feet, send them sprawling. Between the torn-up floor (I had to access our apartment’s main cable somehow) and the drifting flotillas of dirty laundry (it’s hard to find the time to clean when you’re keeping the remnants of your life afloat) I can see how an outsider might be appalled at the mess.
But to me, it’s a sanctuary.
The worst thing about being blind is that things move. The world is always in motion, shifting and changing in unpredictable ways. If e
verything would just stay still, I wouldn’t need to hack into cameras and constantly risk the exposure of using my IRIS cable. I wouldn’t depend on ProRec technology and tangle myself even further into the company that ruined my life. But the world isn’t accommodating like that. Even Mom sometimes forgets, knocking the coffee table aside as she stumbles to the bathroom or shifting the couch on her way to bed (on the rare occasion that she chooses natural dreams over her memories of Zhu). She says she doesn’t mean it and cries every time I end up sprawled on the floor because of an errant piece of furniture. But still it happens, again and again.
Here, in my room, nothing moves. I know where every mountain of clothing is, where every tool nests. I know the canyon I carved out in the middle of the floor the way dancers know their stage, can picture the wires sprouting out of it like weeds. My bed stays shoved against one wall, my jerry-rigged system crawling like vines up the other. Everything has a place, stationary and predictable.
Pixel bumps into my leg as my door slides shut behind me.
Well, almost everything.
With a resigned sigh, I reach down and lift the cat into my arms. He squirms with pleasure and I try not to sneeze as his hair tickles the inside of my nose.
“Come on, you,” I mutter as I step over the hole in my floor to the padded chair in front of my set-up.
It’s a dangerous thing, to enter the VERAN. On the surface, the Verified Access Network seems like a beacon of civilization. Filled with shared memories and free services and the promise of experiences, education, connection, the VERAN offers every single person in this city the kind of things that people two hundred years ago would have killed for. Nowadays, anyone with an IRIS cable can see the world from their living room. Experience a luxury yacht cruise. Jump from planes. Go to college classes or participate in anatomy labs. Anything that a human has done and recorded and shared.
But, like the interstitial fluid that holds a body together, the truth hums between the channels. Company viruses lurk in the code, ready to latch onto your mind, monitor your thoughts, target your weaknesses. Political messages are woven into harmless entertainment. Ads are built like magical spells to compel you to buy this experience, subscribe to that channel, live a life that you didn’t even know existed and can’t possibly afford. A black-market trade of unsavory memories that no one wants to acknowledge thrives between the lines of uploads. And beneath it all, Project Recollection watching, lording over the plugged-in population like ancient tyrants.
They may have everyone else under their thumb, but they aren’t getting me. Unlike the Central Port in our living room, my system is built with direct access to the SubNet, the web beneath the web, where no company—including ProRec—can undo the knots I’ve created to hide who I am.
I slide my IRIS cable into the port I built from scratch and close my eyes, swan-diving into the system with gleeful abandon. Code spills out in front of me, a landscape painted in binary. This is the drywall behind the VERAN’s façade. The secret language of ProRec’s kingdom.
A realm I can pass through like an invisible ghost.
With Pixel on my lap, I begin to sift through my subscriptions.
I pull up all the channels associated with ProRec and begin to comb through them, my daily ritual. There’s a new Anastasia memory, some cutesy recollection of cooking with her cat that’s already been experienced thirteen million times. I make a gagging noise—Pixel meows reproachfully at the sudden disruption—and scroll on, trying not to think about ProRec’s poster child and her manufactured fame.
There are a few public announcements. An IRIS update available for download (yeah right), a stylish new sheath for your cable (in seven brand-new and expensive designs), and some paparazzi gossip about the C.E.O. and her reclusive, faceless daughter. There’s a Sam Baker upload buried in the SubNet, his channel, Veritas, bubbling up to me from the encrypted depths of this digital underbelly, railing against the corruption in the city and the power ProRec wields.
I snort as I realize that I have more in common with a conspiracy theorist than with my own mother.
Shoving the memories aside, I plunge behind the firewalls and begin pulling up the search webs I’d cast out the night before, an algorithm of my own design that isolates memories with non-standard mentions of Project Recollection, Neurowiring, or IRIS coding. I’ve activated this search every day since the morning Zhu vanished. So far it hasn’t found anything.
Maybe today will be different.
The program hums with energy, still yanking relevant recollections out of the immense noise of the VERAN.
There.
Three memories tagged with the appropriate markers.
I pull up the first one.
Blinking, I find myself in a luxurious apartment, surrounded by a crush of people, lit by sepia evening light. The low wooden table in the middle is spread with a lush array of finger-food and abandoned plates. A young man is raising a glass filled with bubbling liquid.
“A toast!” Everyone around him raises their glasses in tandem, attractive young faces lit by the warmth of alcohol and friends, their cables smooth and unaltered. “To Project Recollection, whose brilliant programming brought these two lovebirds together.”
I shove out of the memory, rolling my eyes. At least once a week, a memory comes up of some wedding or bachelorette party, crediting ProRec’s dating channel to their happy nuptials.
As if the company did it out of the goodness of their heart.
Resting one hand on Pixel’s purring back—damned cats do grow on you—I dive into the second memory.
The brim of a hat is pulled low, obscuring half my vision, but I’m in a crowded lobby. Someone is shouting above my head.
“— and Project Recollection refuses to take responsibility!”
The crowd’s voices rise like the Gamers in Kitzima’s den, but angry. Restless. The air is thick, reeking of a fight like the air before a storm.
“They rot our minds, steal our mothers and fathers, push people into the clutches of addiction. And what do they offer in return? New designs? Deluxe Neurowiring? Expensive updates? Our economy is teetering on the point of collapse and they are responsible!”
I pull out of the memory, trying not to think about what it means. Tensions with the Purists have reached a boiling point. Just the other day a young woman was kidnapped and ‘cleansed’ by a group of radicals trying to ‘save her’. They yanked out her cable in some back-alley lab, almost killing the poor girl in the process. If she’d been a Gamer, with her altered wiring rooted deeper into the tissue of her brain, they would have.
But, of course, the Purists don’t care about Gamers. To them, we’re already lost.
A thought bubbles up in my head. Was my father at that rally?
I shove it aside and pull up the third memory, a correspondence that the sender had thoughtlessly forgotten to transmit through ProRec’s secure server.
My eyes focus. I’m in the most luxurious home I’ve ever seen, standing beside an upholstered chair backlit by a roaring fire. Real wood-paneling coats the walls and floor, covered by thick tapestries and oil paintings. The flickering light makes the room scream old money, enough to leave me wondering if the money isn’t old at all.
A deep voice rumbles from the chair, accompanied by a single withered hand rolling a data drive over its knuckles.
“It’s a risk,” the man mutters, his voice wispy. “And a frightening one. They’re pushing the boundaries of Neurowiring here, and who knows if my IRIS could handle it… but Project Recollection has yet to let me down.”
“Sir.” The word comes from my mouth in a stiff baritone. “How do you respond?”
There’s a pause, accompanied only by the crackle of the flames and the click of the drive against the old man’s ring, a heavy square thing with a beaver on it.
“Tell them I’ll do it.”
The memory cuts out.
For a moment, I’m hanging suspended in the VERAN, data packages flying by me
like shooting stars. In my months of searching, this is the first memory I can’t explain away. Can’t puzzle out.
What does it mean?
I try to go back and re-experience the recollection, but the system has swallowed it, sucking the unguarded file away. I could put out my search again, drag it back. But then, I could also go into my own memories to watch it. I refuse to do either. One is too dangerous—someone might realize what I’m searching for. The other…
I imagine that people who live with alcoholics aren’t keen to start drinking either.
So I settle back in my chair, turning the images over in my head. There must be a clue in there somewhere. The fire. The paintings. The wood-paneling. The withered old hand.
The ring.
It takes me less than a second to find an image of it, a square of gold with a beaver in the middle. MIT class ring. I frown, stroking Pixel’s back as my mind scrolls through the images, pondering their meaning.
A rich graduate from MIT accepting an invitation from ProRec.
It isn’t much, but it’s more than I’ve gathered from my endless hunt to find out what happened to my brother.
Is this new program related to ProRec’s claim that Zhu stole company secrets? Is this rich man—perhaps an investor or inventor of some kind—related to the scandal that exploded around my family six months ago? Is the invitation a front for something else?
Or is it just another vague recollection tethered to ProRec’s sprawling reach?
I file away the information, shoving it to the back of my mind to percolate among all the things I’m fighting to understand.
Which reminds me…
An angry flicker of thought pulls Damien’s channel up in a rotating pillar of code. Soar, it’s called, the eagle watermark perched on top. He only has a few hundred halfhearted Tuners, but the way Damien acts you’d think it’s an adoring mob hanging desperately on his every word.