Having made the error of finally agreeing to lunch with L. – what had it been, twenty-three years? –
let’s say the horror was mutual. That’s a lie. She was still beautiful. Her shock was ill-disguised, though.
Thereafter I stayed home. God, what I’d give to be yesterday’s man again!
I miss those long afternoons by the dead phone, with a Martini that never seemed to shrink.
I told Jarvis that I should not be disturbed, retreated to my den, hooked the shutters
and took up my station on what my wife used to call ‘the loser’s couch’, the one with the built-in surround,
before she left with the dogs. I loaded up a bunch of psychogram loops, turned on the wallscreen
and settled back. Initially, I confess, mostly with my pants round my knees, watching old drunken one-night stands
or those first dates when the two of you, still strangers, went further than you’d ever dare again.
Goddamn who was that handsome young buck? Though I worried about ageing even then.
Mostly the loops ran in 16K, and some had enough 3D data to frontform VR so I could watch them with the headset.
So much to see that I missed at the time: the couple fighting over money in the corner,
the wood-pigeon on the branch outside the bedroom, the flailing elm in the window in the 8-ball.
And I could wind back as far as I liked: I recall when I was imaged last year the mnemographer
remarked on what must have been the generally rapt quality of my attention,
as if I’d known the day would come when I’d be doing nothing else.
Anyone using the phrase ‘making memories’ unironically should be shot in the head
unless they only have a year to live, and their kids are very young. Still, I was glad I had.
I blew the last cheque from the streaming revenue for Half-Lives on Jarvis’s severance,
a year’s worth of IV nutro I could just piss back out, and three new modules for my Mnemosync
that would allow me (a) to re-render the loops as first person (our memories are all of someone else)
(b) to sub out my kainotype for my palaeotype and (c) to implant active AI into up to five simultaneous agents
within any given scene. Armed with all this, I could insert my waking self directly back into those bright vignettes
which I could not only play and replay forever, but live within, as in a lucid dream.
I should probably mention at this point that I was always an earlier adopter.
The guy too keen to download the beta, or camping on the sidewalk to be first in line
for his half-working piece of shiny crap. I guess I love the future. It holds such promise!
It just always turns up a bit too early, a bit too good to be true. A failure at the lab to calibrate the self-imaging algo
meant that the star of my home movies kept flicking between then-me and now-me,
leaving me in a narcoplegic lock until it self-corrected. Because I could now only see myself from the inside out,
the effect was initially comic: me, stuck on the park slide, with the parents yelling Get that old wino off there
or my liver-spotted hand up in the air, proudly answering a times table quiz for Mrs Garland.
Others were just depressing. That day at the lido with Mum and Dad, thirty years older than them both,
the two of them trying to locate a facial expression of tender revulsion, and failing, and failing;
or that first kiss with L. – at the hedge behind her house, and her – sixteen, like apple blossom,
her mouth pliant and cool with cheap white wine – springing back in horror at the whitebeard with the loose teeth
and the tongue down her throat. Worse was looking down at our naked bodies, latched like some sick white crab
praying she wouldn’t open her eyes before I could waken my hand on the escape key.
Yet I am already looking back on these as the best of times, as for days now
I’ve been locked in a two-second glitch-loop, where I am stuck with my mouth on the full breast
of my young beautiful mother, who looks down at me and will not stop screaming and screaming.