T. R. Napper’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Grimdark Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, and numerous others. His work has been translated into Hebrew, German, and French.
By profession T. R. Napper is an aid worker, recently returned to Australia after three years in Vietnam. He is currently undertaking a creative writing PhD focusing on speculative fiction in Southeast Asia.
ASTRANGE LOOP
T. R. Napper
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.—Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop
A huge clown, jaws as wide as Irving was tall, about to swallow him whole . . . A woman, black hair with the fringe cut too short, green eye-shadow, skin so smooth it looked real-life airbrushed . . . The woman—what was her name again?—yelling at him, perfect skin creased with contempt . . . a red fireworks blast, neon, frozen into the sky . . . fairy floss and sweat and machine grease in his nostrils and a girl, freckled, staring up at him with tears in her eyes . . . and those sounds, tinny music on a maddening, endless cycle, and the clown, swallowing him, while the woman yelled and the girl watched with sadness.
Irving Kupfermann blinked into consciousness. White room with a white duo, man and woman, standing over him. The woman, young, lips glistening in the bright lights, pressed a paper cup into his hand. “Drink this,” she said. Irving drank, first sipping, then gulping as the extent of his thirst hit him. The man looked familiar. He wore a white lab coat and grasped a flexis-creen in both hands, looking down into its green-glowing ideograms. The doctor—Irving was pretty sure that’s what he was—had a full head of silver hair that probably wasn’t real, and a movie star chin that most definitely wasn’t real. The gold of the heavy chain around his wrist: that would be real. The doctor looked forty, but he stank of money. Probably closer to sixty.
Doctor Eduard—the name floated up and popped into Irving’s forebrain— spoke to the nurse. “Potentials for synaptic growth and multiplication high, as are an increased release of kinase A proteins. Emotional response very high; memories appear authentic across all measures. Or the patient believes they are real, in any case.” He enunciated each word clearly, like he expected his audience to savour every single one.
“Yes doctor,” the nurse replied, smiling, as she eased something from the top of Irving’s head—he caught a glimpse of a green neon circle. To his left, coming into view as the nurse moved to one side, was a painting of a tobacco pipe. Underneath it was written: this is not a pipe. Irving furrowed his brow at that.
The doctor looked up at Irving and gave him the perfect imitation of a smile, his pristine white teeth matching the room. “You always bring us a first-class product, Irving.”
Irving grunted and handed the nurse the empty cup.
“Now: do you remember anything of the memory you just sold?”
Irving shook his head. “No. Not really. It’s like a dream. It’s there at the edge of my mind . . . fragments. There was a woman, I think she was angry.”
Doctor Eduard nodded. “Best that you sold it to us then. The key to happiness, Irving, is a bad memory.”
Irving gave a non-committal shrug.
“Those remaining fragments should fade away, and by the time you get home today, they will have decamped completely from your cerebral cortex. But, remember Irving,” said the doctor, finger in the air, “in the unlikely event any of this does come back to you, you must inform us post-haste. It is a violation of mnemonic copyright to remember things you no longer legally own. In such an eventuality we would need you to return here immediately to eliminate the rogue memories.”
“Post-haste,” said Irving. “Indubitably.”
The doctor missed the sarcasm, smiled insincerely, and returned to looking over his flexiscreen.
Irving leaned back into the chair, relieved at the embrace of the soft, real leather against the back of his head. He’d been seated during the procedure, yet still felt exhausted. “How can I know if I’m remembering things I’ve sold?”
“Ah yes, very good question,” said the doctor, returning Irving’s gaze with a supercilious expression that clearly indicated that, in fact, it was a very stupid question. “We have a trace program downloaded from the Kandel-Yu machine into your memory pin. If it picks up a specific neural pattern in your cerebral cortex—a unique grouping we call a memory-print—you will receive a warning on-retina advising you that you have begun to re-consolidate memories under license to us here at Thanks for the Memories. Often this will happen when you are dreaming.”
Irving rubbed at his eye. “You tell me this often, doctor?”
“Very.”
The nurse suppressed a giggle.
Irving nodded at her. “Is she an actual nurse, or are the staff here hired to laugh at you?”
The doctor raised an eyebrow. The nurse retained her smile as she said: “A post-graduate qualification, three-year internship, and a field of five hundred candidates for this position.”
Her response came easy. Irving pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. “I guess I’ve said that before, as well.”
“Once or twice,” said the doctor, with a smirk. “When you’re in a particularly bad mood. Something, I suspect, related to the experience you just sold to us.”
“Yeah. Yeah, forget it.”
“I was hoping you would,” replied the doctor.
The nurse’s smile widened.
Irving rolled his eyes.
The doctor pulled a vial from the pocket of his coat. “This is Neothebaine. Pour yourself a stiff drink when you get home, and add this before you imbibe. The memory eradication procedure should be sufficient to disrupt the neural print containing the target memory. But this—” the doctor held the vial up, its amber contents catching the light “—will be sure to wipe any remnants clean. You likely will not remember coming here to Thanks for the Memories, and you certainly will not remember either the procedure or this conversation.”
“No problem,” said Irving, and touched the cochlear-glyph implant behind his left ear, fingertip against the small circle of cool steel. “Exo-memory: remind me to drink Doctor Eduard’s date-rape drug when I get home.”
His exo-memory whispered back to him, its tone as flat as the steel of the implant: “Yes, Mister Kupfermann.”
Unperturbed, the doctor typed something into his flexiscreen. “And finally, your compensation has gone through.”
A message appeared on-retina, to Irving’s eyes only, in soft green glowing
type:
A deposit of 70,500 dollars has been recorded in your UberCoin account. You’ve done it! You’ve hit your savings target. Next steps:
1) Ask your wife, Ondine Drinkwater, out to dinner to an expensive restaurant
2) At dinner, explain that through your entrepreneurial acumen, you’ve become highly successful
a) Making sure to avoid mention of your numerous trips to Thanks for the Memories
3) As financial security has always been important to Ondine, it is important that you emphasize both your newfound reliability, and your considerable wealth
4) This will convince her to end your trial separation and let you return home to her and your daughter, Eulalie
Just a glance at the list made him smile. He’d done it. It’d been a long time, it’d been . . . Well, he wasn’t sure how long it had been. None of that mattered now. He was going to be reunited with his wife and daughter.
Irving pushed himself out of the chair and walked out of the room. The doctor was trying to tell him something; he didn’t hear a word the man said. He walked through the expansive, marble reception and stepped out of the large double doors at the front of the building. Irving breathed deeply, smile still on his face, squinting under a hot white sun.
It was time for him to come home.
“Irving.”
He looked up and there she was: Ondine. Purple eye shadow, black hair with the fringe cut too short, and that soft, glowing skin. She was under-dressed in denim pants and a tight leather jacket, but he didn’t notice that. She was twenty minutes late, but he didn’t think about that, either. All he could think about at that moment was the time, long ago, when he could have leaned over and kissed this beautiful woman, and she would have laughed and let him do so.
She wasn’t laughing now.
“Ondine,” he said, smiling despite the expression on her face. He stood up, dropping the gold-trimmed napkin he’d been playing with, and moved around the table to take her chair out.
“I got it Irving, I got it,” she said, but he pulled it out anyway.
She treated that with a raised eyebrow and half-smile. “I’m, ah, sorry I’m late.” Ondine’s voice was rich, throaty. She could be lead singer in a hard rock band. Or the voice-over for a sexy cartoon character.
“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing. Wine?”
“No,” she said, brusquely. And then, less so: “Not at lunch. I’ve got to get back to work after this.”
“Well—” he grimaced “—you couldn’t make dinner.”
“Be thankful you got lunch,” she said, deadpan.
Something twisted in his chest. “Shall we order, then?”
“Maybe. What’s this about, Irving?” she asked, indicating his clothes with her chin.
He glanced down. The suit was dark-blue, tailor-made, with sharp creases freshly pressed. He wore a white shirt and smoke-blue tie, set with a silver tie-pin that matched the ring on his pinkie finger. He’d shaved his rough beard off, dabbed on some cologne, and tied his unruly curls back in a short pony-tail. The restaurant was none other than The Prince—the most sought-after dining spot in town. Gold-gilded cutlery, waiters in blood-red jackets, white light glinting through crystal chandeliers, and the soft murmurings of the good and great as they smiled fake smiles at each other and crunched hors d’oeuvres between perfectly symmetrical teeth.
“I’m trying to make an impression,” he said.
“You look like an insurance salesman.”
“That wasn’t the impression I was going for.”
“So you’re not trying to sell me something?”
“Just a dream.”
“Oh Irving,” she said. “Spare the schmaltz, buster. It doesn’t suit either of us.” But she smiled as she said it, and the twisting in Irving’s chest loosened a little.
He pointed at her clothes. “Where do you get to work dressed like that? You a roadie now?”
“I work from home, you know that.”
“Doing what?”
Her brows furrowed. “Speech therapist, Irving. Same as always; same as I’ve been doing for the past ten years.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he lied. “I meant the same sort of speech therapy you used to do.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Right. Sure. The same sort of speech therapy as I always did.”
Irving carefully hid his embarrassment. “And Eulalie—how is she? Still the smartest kid in class?”
Ondine paused, permitting her irritation to ebb. “Yes. Her teacher thinks she’ll be able to skip fourth grade. She . . . ” Ondine trailed off, looked down at her purple-painted nails.
“She?”
She sighed and looked back at him. “She misses you.”
“I miss her too,” he said, and it was the truest thing he’d said in a long time.
Things went well after that. For a little while, anyway.
Ondine agreed that she may as well stay for lunch, as she was there, after all. So they ate. And it was good. He ordered real meat and Ondine said oh no, eyes like circles, but he insisted and they shared a minute steak. They agreed neither of them had eaten meat since they honeymooned in Fiji, and then laughed about getting kicked out of the resort. They’d taken magic mushrooms and—in the throes of a sublime mind-and-body-buzz—broken into the kids’ play centre and pasted glitter all over their naked bodies. Ondine had then convinced Irving that they were Moroccan glow worms looking for a burrow. A groundskeeper caught them an hour later, digging a hole in a golf course green with their hands.
Irving excused himself to the bathroom after they’d finished the main. He checked the stalls to make sure he was alone, then put a finger to his implant. “Exo-memory: I want on-retina recall dialled to maximum while I have lunch with Ondine Drinkwater. I don’t want to forget a single detail about our lives together—not a detail. Understood?”
“Understood, Mister Kupfermann,” whispered the implant. “I am required to remind you that you have previously ordered me to keep all memory prompts down to Level One: only in case of emergency or direct request. You said, and I quote, ‘I don’t need that shit haunting me anymore’.”
Irving looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t recognize the guy in there. The shiny blue suit and the pale, sweaty skin and the ponytail and that ridiculous tie-pin he bought for ten grand at a glittering store full of smug service staff. He looked like a douche. Felt like one, too. The only thing that remained familiar was the nose. Big hook nose that Ondine charitably called ‘Roman.’ Combined with the bags under his eyes he didn’t feel very Roman, right then. He looked like a vulture, picking over the carcass of his marriage.
“Bloody hell,” he said, to himself. “Way to ruin the mood, arsehole.”
“Sorry, Mister Kupfermann?” murmured the implant.
“Nothing, it’s nothing.”
“Mister Kupfermann?”
“ What?” he hissed.
“Are you sure you want your exo-memory turned up to maximum?”
He looked away from the mirror. “You heard me. I want to remember everything.”
Dessert came. She had ice-cream; he had coffee, strong and black. Ondine was quiet, biting her bottom lip as she ran her finger slow around the edge of the porcelain bowl. Irving waited for her to say what she wanted to say.
Eventually she did. “So where did all this—” she waved a hand at the room “—come from?”
“Hope, Ondine, it came from hope,” he said, and reached across the table, putting his hand on hers. She didn’t take hers away. “Hope can be the irrational desire for a miracle, despite all evidence to the contrary. But that’s not the sort of hope I have. Mine is based on the reality of what we had together, Ondine, and the concrete steps I’ve taken to reclaim my life. I’m successful now, like you always said I could be. I can be someone you depend on. I’m someone you can build realistic hopes around. All this is a manifestation of that—not an idle promise, but a promise kept, to myself, that I was worthy enough to get you back.”
Ondine was silent for a time, a strange expression on her face. “You been practicing that?”
“No.”
His exo-memory typed: You have been practicing: seven times this morning and eleven times last night. Twelve in front of the mirror, five while walking in a circle around the kitchen table, once while you were on the toilet.
He rubbed his eye, annoyed at the contradictory blurb in the corner of his vision. “Yes. Okay yes, I’ve been practicing.” He looked at her. “How did I do?”
“You did fine.”
“But?”
For the next few weeks, every time he smelled the bitter scent of strong black coffee, his mind would time travel backwards, and he’d see her as she was then. Something alive and real against the forced elegance of the restaurant and the manufactured glamour of its patrons. He would remember every detail: her leather jacket, creased with decades of loving use; her smooth skin a perfection no amount of genetic manipulation could replicate; and the sadness in her eyes as she first realised, and then rejected, his intentions.
“But, Irving,” she said, “I’m happy you’re back on your feet again. Truly happy, I mean that. And if you want to start seeing Eulalie, then I’ll agree to that. Slow at first, with me there, at my place. She wants to see her father again and I want you back in her life.” Ondine sighed. “But you and I, Irving? That’s ancient history. We had a good run. A few good years followed by a couple of terrible ones. It’s how these things end all the time, every day: in bitterness and regret. There’s no hope left for us, just the rubble.”
He gripped her hand harder. “But Ondine. You’re not listening. This restaurant isn’t an accident. This is who I am now. I’m successful, I’m a win-ner—I’m all those things you wanted me to be.”
She pulled her hand from his. The softness left her voice. “It isn’t about money.”
“Bullshit,” he said, loud enough for heads turn their way. He lowered it again. “Bullshit. It’s all you ever talked about.” “That’s not true.”
“It is precisely true. Always money: money for the rent, for holidays, organic food, fancy medicine, better schools, better fucking everything. You want me to play it back for you right now? I still have all those memories.”
As he spoke the exo-memory popped up on-retina, taking some of the heat out of his accusations: I have many examples of Ondine criticizing you for other reasons. Would you like me to list them?
Ondine didn’t get angry. Instead she sighed, pushing her two scoops of fifty dollar ice-cream absently with her spoon. “I’m sure you could play back those fights. I remember all that, too. And you’re right, it was wrong of me to put it that way. When you’re angry you reach for the cheap shots, and they were cheap shots. But it was never about that.”
“Then what was it about?”
She looked up from the bowl, her face tinged with regret. “It was about ambition, Irving. We used to dream and plan together, about our family, our careers. But you fell into this rut and never got out. You gave up on nano-tech, neglected your daughter. Me. God Irving—you spent more time betting on weather patterns and drinking gin with your pals down at the bowls club than you ever did on trying to make a career. You were just going through the motions of life, constantly looking over the horizon, waiting for your ship to come in.”
“That’s not true.”
Ondine Drinkwater is correct. She encouraged you on 103 occasions to pursue your career. You spent 2,428 hours researching and betting on weather patterns, whereas you spent 41 hours applying for jobs in the nano-technology field. An image appeared above the words, of Ondine, concerned expression on her face. If he gave his exo-memory the command the image would become a playback of Ondine, from many years before, encouraging him to pursue his career. He didn’t give the command.
The present-day Ondine continued talking, her voice overlapping with the on-retina accusations. “Remember when you won the University Prize for your thesis on nano-technology and desertification? You could have parlayed that into a career—you had some great companies offer you an internship.” She shook her head. “But you said you didn’t want to work for free. You wanted the big bucks, straight away, so you turned them all down.” He creased his forehead.
Ondine Drinkwater is incorrect about the University Prize. No record of receiving an award for your thesis exists in your exo-memory. Ondine Drinkwater’s recollections of job offers are correct. You rejected job offers from four different companies.
“I never won a university prize.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about, ‘never won’?” Something itched in his mind. He couldn’t remember it. Unless . . . “You don’t remember, do you?”
He set his jaw. “I don’t remember because it never happened.”
Ondine sighed through her nose. “It was one of the best nights we ever had, Irving. We got wasted at the reception at the Chancellor’s house; we danced and danced while all the guests just stood around staring at us. Then we snuck off and did it in one of the spare rooms. The Chancellor’s wife found us the next morning, passed out on the bed. You were naked except for a smoking jacket you’d stolen from the Chancellor’s wardrobe.” She shook her head, half-smiling at the memory. “She didn’t even blink. Just told us she was happy someone enjoyed the party, and then cooked us omelettes for breakfast.”
Irving was silent.
“How can you not remember that, Irving? And what did you mean before when you said you still had all those memories of us fighting?”
“I . . . ” He broke eye contact, looked down into the black of his coffee.
She shook her head. “I knew it. I knew it. You’re selling memories aren’t you? That’s what all this—” she dropped her spoon into the ice-cream “— bullshit is. This room filled with wankers, that ridiculous suit. It’s another get rich quick scheme, isn’t it?”
“No. No it’s not another scheme.”
You have previously discussed—on twenty-eight occasions—getting rich quick through selling memories, Mister Kupfermann. Your bank account currently has over fifteen million dollars, which you have claimed, in conversation with others, has come from memory sales. While your exo-memory has no direct recordings of you selling memory, it does have twenty-three instances of you approaching a memory acquisition business. It is possible you had these sections of your memory wiped during the procedure. I have scanned the two years since you separated from Ondine and can find no other possible source of your current wealth.
“Okay,” Irving said, fists clenching against the tabletop. “Okay.” He breathed out slowly. “Okay, yeah, I sold some memories. Just to get ahead. Get my life back together.” He tried to reach for her again, but she jerked her hand away like he’d just offered her a dead rat. “I did it for us, Ondine, for our family.”
“Oh Irving, you and your bullshit. Every scheme was always for the family.” She threw one hand up, exasperated. “I don’t get it. Why would you sell something so good? If your goal was getting back together with me, why would you sell one of the best moments we shared?”
He said: “I don’t know,” but he did know. Even if he couldn’t remember the procedures, he understood the pricing structure behind them perfectly. The most emotionally potent memories always fetched the most money—that and them being unique. Wiping them from one’s own memory, so the rich client was the sole proprietor. “I didn’t see it as selling memories. I saw it as an investment in a long, happy future of new memories. Once we’re back together, I’ll never have to sell another.”
“More bullshit.” She started to get up from her seat. “And I’m done listening to it.”
“Wait.” He got up from his seat as well. “Eulalie—I do want to see our daughter. That’s not bullshit.” As the words came out of his mouth he felt the truth of them, and was relieved.
She rubbed her forehead, but he’d found the right nerve. She sat back down, gingerly, on the edge of the seat.
He took a deep breath.
His exo-memory assumed the pause was an invitation for further information. Eulalie, your daughter, eight years old. A picture of his daughter’s face appeared above the writing. Hazel eyes like his, black hair like her mother’s, a cheeky grin all her own. Eulalie goes to North Fitzroy Montessori primary school, her favourite colour is purple with blue spots, and she has a pet goldfish called Squeak-and-Bubble.
“Are you reading something on-retina?” asked Ondine, sharply.
He refocused on her. “No.”
“Bullshit. Same old Irving. Even now, in your grand attempt at winning me back, you can’t help but put the freewave on. Is there a cricket game on today?”
“I’m not watching the cricket. I’m not watching anything.”
“I don’t believe you. It was ever thus—zoned out on some stupid live-feed every time I tried to talk to you.”
He felt his face going red. Part anger, part embarrassment. “That’s not true.”
It is mostly true: you watched sports, betting markets, or Chinese Kung-Fu films on-retina during 81% of your conversations with Ondine.
His fingernails dug into the palms of his hand.
Ondine looked at him for ten long seconds before she said: “Do you remember Luna Park?”
It was a test. And it was immediately clear it was a test he was going to fail. “Umm.”
“Do you remember Luna Park, Irving?”
“Yes.” He licked his lips. “Of course.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying—I do remember Luna Park.”
No recording of Luna Park exists in your exo-memory.
“Ah—stop!”
Her eyes went a stone-cold shade of bitter. “I will not stop.”
“No, no, not you. It’s my exo-memory, it—”
“I knew it.”
He hit the table. Cutlery danced, heads turned his way again and a middle-aged man in a red jacket suddenly appeared next to the table.
“Is everything all right here, sir?”
“Yes, yes,” said Irving. “We’re fine.”
Ondine said to the maître d’: “It’s not a problem. I’m leaving,” and got up from her seat.
“I think that would be best,” replied the maître d’.
Irving reached out his hand to her, begging. “No Ondine, please don’t leave.”
Ondine looked down at him, eyes glistening. “You need help, Irving. Professional help. You’re stuck in an endless loop of self-denial. You need to find a way out.”
She walked away.
“Sir,” said the head waiter, interposing himself between Irving and the exit as he rose to follow his wife. Irving’s lip curled in anger, but before he could barge past, the man spoke, voice an urgent whisper. “Sir, you are making a scene.”
“Fuck you,” Irving hissed. He pushed past, jogging from the restaurant, red-faced, as everyone stared.
He couldn’t see Ondine when he burst out onto the street. Squinting under the bone-white sun, spinning around, trying to glimpse her receding form in the heat shimmer rising from the sidewalk. His eyes watered from the sun. The sun: that’s what he tried to tell himself, anyway, before he sold the memory a few weeks later.
Irving stood in the huge clown mouth that formed the entrance of Luna Park, jaws three times as wide as he was tall. Eulalie waited, looking up at him, a cloud of pink fairy floss in her left hand. She was trying to tell him something, but he had a hand up, trying to stop her from speaking while he read the weather reports on-retina. He’d placed a series of bets on temperature and precipitation ranges in south-eastern China, and the official results were just coming in.
“Fuck it!” he yelled.
“Daddy?”
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
“But daddy—”
“Not now Eulalie.”
“But daddy I want to go—”
“Not now dammit!” he screamed.
Eulalie jumped, dropping the floss to the ground. Tears welled instantly.
Ondine had walked ahead, not realizing that he and Eulalie had stopped. Now she returned just to hear the end of him yelling. She seemed to be in shock for a few seconds, standing there, her smooth skin glowing in the blinking neon backwash of the amusement park.
“Jesus Irving,” she said, picking her daughter up.
“Quiet,” he hissed, eyes unfocussed as the massacre of his wagers scrolled down on-retina.
“Quiet? No. I’m not . . . ”
He tuned her out, her words background static to failure’s sting. He clenched his teeth as the news got worse and worse, and as Ondine’s criticisms started to cut through his concentration.
“Enough!” he yelled. “Enough of your nagging. Enough of your complaints.”
She put a hand over her daughter’s ear. “Not in front of Eulalie.”
“Eulalie,” he sneered, focusing now on wife and daughter. “I hate that name. Where did you get it? ‘Top ten hippest new names for children’ in the Huffington Post?”
Ondine’s mouth popped open, struggling to get out a reply.
He didn’t let her.
“No! Time for me to speak now. Time. For. Me. To. Speak.” He jabbed a finger at her with each word. “You never support my business decisions. You never listen to me. All I get from you is scorn and derision. You didn’t even let me have a say in our own daughter’s name. Eulalie? What sort of ridiculous name is that!?”
The steam started to leave his delivery as he watched the reaction of his wife and daughter. Eulalie, head buried in her mother’s shoulder, sobbing. Ondine, her perfect skin creased with contempt.
“You d-don’t understand,” he stuttered, his rage train coming off its rails.
“I understand, Irving.”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Lose another bet, I take it?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh it is Irving, it is exactly that simple,” she said, her voice a terrifying calm. “It’s the most uncomplicated thing in the world. You’re lazy.”
“Don’t.”
“Greedy.”
“Don’t.”
“Resentful.”
“Not in front of Eulalie.”
“Cruel, isn’t it? Almost as bad as telling your own daughter that you hate her name. Well, I’ve needed to be cruel for a long time, but I’ve been a coward. Not anymore. I’m going to do what I needed to do a year ago, and I’m doing it here, in front of your daughter, so you understand that it is final.”
Eulalie had taken her head from her mother’s shoulder and was staring up at her as she spoke.
His eyes flicked to his daughter, then back to his wife. “Don’t. I’m sorry—”
“Goodbye Irving.”
She walked away. Only his daughter looked back. Watching him over her mother’s shoulder, eyes filled with tears.
Irving watched them leave, hands hanging limply at his side. Nowhere else to go, he wandered back into Luna Park. Into the cacophony of tinny music on a maddening, endless cycle, into the smell of fairy floss and sweat and machine grease, and the clown, swallowing him, while—
WARNING WARNING WARNING: these memories are property of the Mobius Group. Report immediately to your nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise for memory realignment.
Bleep bleep bleep bleep
WARNING WARNING WARNING: these memories are property of the Mobius Group. Report immediately to your nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise for memory realignment.
bleep bleep bleep bleep
“No.” Irving woke himself with the moan. “No.” He switched off the alarm and dismissed the message flashing on-retina.
He lay back on the bed, stared at the off-white ceiling. Moonlight and street light ebbed through the slatted window. The hum of the building’s hydrogen generator drifted up from below. He took control of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest slowing.
“No.”
The ubiquitous double happiness ideogram split in two as the doors opened for Irving. The room inside was gloomy, thick with incense. A cymbal and discordant pipes of traditional Chinese music played softly from hidden speakers, and overhead red lanterns swung slightly on a breeze Irving couldn’t feel. A young Chinese man in a traditional straight-collared suit sat behind a darkwood reception desk.
“Um,” said Irving. “My exo-memory told me I had an appointment.”
The receptionist stood and bowed. “Mister Kupfermann. Omissioner Zau is waiting for you. Follow me.”
Irving tried to bow back, but the young man had already disappeared down the dim, red-tinted corridor. Irving was shown through a dark redwood door carved with stylistic, eastern dragons with large, wild eyes. The receptionist closed the door behind Irving, leaving him in an even darker room.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. Within the gloom lay a traditional study with dark, wood-panelled walls, interspersed with red scrolls marked with calligraphy. There were white-and-blue porcelain pots sitting on plinths; leather-bounds books along the back wall; a golden bust of some old Chinese guy with a receding hairline in one corner; and in the middle of it all, an even older Chinese man sitting cross-legged on a woven mat with arms crossed, hands hidden in dark blue silk sleeves.
The old man had a strand of grey hair clinging to his chin. His eyes were closed.
Irving hesitated, wondering for a moment whether he’d caught the old bugger sleeping.
“Kupfermann xiansheng” the old man intoned, in a thick Chinese accent. “Please, sit.”
Irving jumped a little. On second glance the man’s eyes were open. Sparkling slivers in a lined old face, fixed on him.
Irving stutter-stepped forward. “Omissioner Zau?”
The old man bowed.
“I . . . I don’t remember making this appointment.”
“But you have a problem,” said the Omissioner. It wasn’t a question.
“I’ve—ah—yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.”
“Sit.”
Irving sat, cross-legged, three feet from the Omissioner.
“Tea?”
Irving shook his head.
The Omissioner waited, face inscrutable. It took Irving a long half-minute to realise the old man was waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat, irritated by the incense. “It’s a—it’s about a memory I’ve sold to an extraction service.”
Still the old man waited.
Irving continued: “It—the memory—is coming back. And I . . . ” He paused. It felt like he was making confession. “I’m worried about others I’ve sold. I think things may have got a little out of control—I had this life with my wife. I mean lunch—lunch with my wife. She mentioned this—this incident in Luna Park, which I couldn’t remember at first, but which I’ve started to dream about.”
A hand appeared from within the Omissioner’s sleeve. “Your memory pin please, Mister Kupfermann.”
Irving’s mouth tightened.
The old man waited, gnarled hand extended.
Irving sighed. He put his finger to his cochlear implant and murmured the password. A quiet click sounded and the memory pin popped out of the steel. He plucked it between thumb and forefinger and handed it to the Omissioner.
Zau unclipped a dark green bracelet from his wrist and unfurled it, revealing a latest-model flexiscreen. One foot square, paper-thin, soft-glowing green. The Omissioner placed the memory pin on it and hid his hands back within his sleeves. The ancient lines of the old man’s face were lit up by reflected green as ideograms and graphs flowed across the screen.
After a minute of looking through the data, the man’s disposition changed completely. He took his hands from his sleeves, stopped squinting, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a hidden pocket. “Dear oh dear. So you’re a Johnny,” he said, in a suddenly broad Australian accent. He lit his cigarette with a chrome lighter and snapped it shut, throwing it on the floor in front of him.
“A what?” asked Irving.
The Omissioner blew a cloud of smoke upwards. “You know—a memory hooker, an auto-amnesiac. Selling off those crystal-clear, seminal life moments to the ruling class—a Johnny.”
Irving paused, trying to get past the incongruity of the broad Australian accent coming out of the old Chinese guy’s mouth. “What? What is this— what game are you playing here?”
“Whatever do you mean?” the old man replied, with a half-smile that suggested he knew exactly what Irving meant.
Irving pointed an open hand at the room. “This game.”
“This,” said the Omissioner, letting his gaze roam around the gloom. “This is all part of the Mysteries of the East surcharge.” When he said Mysteries of the East his accent switched, for a moment, from Australian back to Chinese.
“Mysteries of the East?”
“Mysteries of the East, mate. Rich bastards don’t come here just for science; they want a mythic flourish from an ancient civilization. So I charge them extra for their ignorance, and give the same service they’d get from any other memory expert.”
“But—but everyone says the role of the Omissioner is an ancient Chinese tradition.”
“Oh yeah, sure mate. Thousands of years ago China had the Omissioners. Their sole responsibility was to remind the Emperor of important traditions or precedents.” Zau took a drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke upwards. “But many other cultures had something similar. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were attached to poets as official memorizers. For centuries the Jews had the tannaim, who memorized oral law. All cultures, more or less, have had memory experts attached to the elite. The advent of the printing press, books, and libraries changed all that: they democratized exo-mem-ory for the masses. For a couple of centuries, anyway. Until the invention of the cochlear-glyph and the subsequent epidemic of memory decline that has made good recall the rarest of commodities. These days, the virtuosos of natural memory like me—” an ironic grin touched Zau’s lips “—Well mate, I’m the darling of the elite.”
Zau pointed at Irving with the end of his cigarette. “But you ain’t the elite. You ain’t a repeat customer. You’re a Johnny. Your wealth has come from selling off your personal history, right?”
“Well—”
“And you’re here to ask me to fix the dog’s breakfast you’ve made of the inside of your head, yes?”
“Well, yes, there’s this—”
“Then you’re here to ask me to fix the unfixable. I see people like you all the time. Bloody idiots, one and all. You got no other source of income, right?”
Irving started to deny it, out of instinct. But he relented and shook his head no.
“Then I can’t prescribe a way out of this for you. To fix the damage you’ve done, to reclaim some of the fragments of these lost memories, I’ll need time. Months. But even if you could afford me, the memories I’d reconstruct would mostly be copyrighted. So that’s no good.” He took another drag, glittering eyes fixed on Irving. “You could purchase the memories of others in order to improve your overall brain function, of course. But I’m not a butcher. I don’t trade in the prime cuts of the personal histories of the desperate.”
Irving decided to focus on the only part of the little speech that could help him. “How would other people’s memories help?”
“You don’t know?” asked the Omissioner, with a hint of surprise.
“It’s—” Irving rubbed at his eye, he knew this “—on the tip of my tongue.”
“You don’t remember. Of course you don’t. How could you, after all the things those bastards have done to you?” The Omissioner had let his anger show, for a moment, but he stubbed it out with his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him.
Zau took a long breath, and then said: “When you sell a memory to the ruling class, you’re not simply selling one of your experiences. I mean, that’s part of it—having their subconscious integrate someone else’s experience as their own. The human brain is a wonderful thing isn’t it? Takes a distinct event from someone else’s life and—with a little nudging from technology and a good night’s sleep—absorbs it as one of its own.
“But what you’re really selling is the vitality and emotion of that experience. The power of these memories is such that when you experience them, they increase the strength and number of synaptic connections in your neural pathways. The rich need this, more than anyone, because nearly all of them are constantly editing their histories. For everything: relationships, jobs, family, making their lives seem superior to that of regular people. Bloody hell— some of them have a bad day they’ll erase it and replace it with a good one. In the end you get a kind of mass delusion among the one per cent—half their lives are based on vivid memories they’ve bought from Johnnies like you. So they become ever more dependent on top-of-the-line exo-memory to fabricate visual recordings and forge a consistent life narrative. In turn, they become less and less reliant on their own brains to encode new memories, and unused, those pathways atrophy.”
Zau took a long drag on his smoke and blew out a long slow cloud, watching as it curled its way to the ceiling. “So, there it is, mate. That’s why they pay so handsomely for your memories. Not just for the experience, but to repair brain damage.”
Irving felt the dread, sitting on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. “How bad, Zau? How much have I lost?”
The Omissioner pointed at Irving’s memory pin, sitting on the flexiscreen. “I can’t tell you what memories you’ve lost. Not at a glance, anyway.”
“What can you tell me then?”
“How many memories you’ve sold.”
Irving’s breath came harder. “Well then, how many?”
“Two hundred and nineteen.”
It felt like a punch in the chest. “Fuck me.”
“Hmmm.”
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Mate. It’s as bad as it gets.”
“Can . . . can I buy memories, like you said, help repair the damage?”
The Omissioner shook his head. “You’re remembering for them wholesale, but they’re selling it retail. If you’ve got no income other than selling memories, then you’re nothing more than a snake eating its own tail.”
“And you?”
“No. I’m not going re-craft your life into some sort of delusion—that’s what mercenaries like Thanks for the Memories do. That’s simply replacing one form of mental illness—dementia—for another—psychosis. My methods are more sophisticated than those butchers. They’re also much more expensive.”
“Can you do anything for me?” asked Irving, voice strained.
Omissioner Zau seemed oblivious. “Prescribe you Alzheimer’s medication. It’ll stabilize your condition, maybe even allow for a partial improvement. You’ll never be the way you were, but so long as you don’t sell anymore memories you should lead a relatively normal life.”
“Relatively?”
“Well—like I said—you have low-grade Alzheimer’s. You’re mildly intellectually impaired.”
“What the fuck?”
Zau paused for a moment. “Apologies. I tend to be less polite with people who won’t remember my rudeness.” The old man held out his cigarettes. “Fag?”
Irving shook his head.
“Drink?”
“Yeah,” Irving said, with a sigh. “Yeah, I could use one.”
The old man hopped up, far more sprightly than Irving would have guessed, and disappeared through a bead curtain in a dark corner of the room. As he did so, Irving saw that the Omissioner had no cochlear-glyph implant behind his ear. It had been a long time since he’d met someone unplugged.
Zau returned soon after with a bottle of amber liquid and two tumblers. The Omissioner settled down again across from Irving, poured them each three fingers. Irving downed his in a single hit. It burned his throat, but not too much, and relieved a little of the tension in his chest.
“I could go back to work,” said Irving. “Nano-tech pays well, if you stick with it. I could make enough to afford even you.” He smiled weakly.
Zau poured Irving another whisky. “No.”
“No?” What smile Irving had faded.
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
The Omissioner finished his whisky, eyes on Irving. “Imagination, that’s why. If you went back to work you’d be largely reliant on exo-memory, and exo-memory never made a new discovery or developed a new idea. It doesn’t have the rich associations of a natural memory, cannot accrete the layers of knowledge, interacting with each other, which give birth to an original idea. Memory is an act of creativity—the ability to form connections between disparate memories, build something new with them, and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a dance, or a nano-tech innovation.
“And you, Irving? You’ve pretty much lost your ability to create future memory. You used to be good at nano-tech? That’s gone now. You can’t get that back.”
Irving stared at the glass in his hand. He gave a sigh that included his shoulders, and said: “Well, I want to keep what I’ve got left, including the one I have of my daughter.” His throat closed a little when he said daughter.
“Sorry mate. But you won’t be able to do even that. You keep remembering copyrighted memories, you’ll get three years in jail and a fine so big you’ll be out on the street.” Zau waved his cigarette absently in the air. “You could leave the country, if you’re that desperate. A few countries left don’t have memory copyright. Belize has great beaches.”
Irving looked up at him. “Belize?”
“Belize.”
“Fuck Belize.”
Zau shrugged.
“Fuck Belize right in the arse.”
“That’s probably overdoing it.”
Irving picked his whisky up, and then put it down again, un-sipped. “What are my other options?”
“Options, chief?” Zau said, eyes narrowing. “You’re all out of options. You’re a fly, struggling in their web. Being aware of this fact is largely irrelevant. They’ll get what they want from you, one way or another. You resist, you’ll go to jail, and the judgment against you will include enforced reclamation of that stolen property—” Zau placed a finger on his own temple “—sitting there inside your head. And the government ain’t as careful extracting memories as the recall companies. It can get messy.”
Irving was silent. He let the words sting him, let the sting linger.
“Unless . . . ” Zau trailed off. His eyes bored right into Irving, searching for something.
“Unless?”
The Omissioner took a long drag of his cigarette. “Unless you settle for the only thing you really can get now: revenge.”
“Revenge? Against who?”
“Mate. Against the mercenaries that built this edifice of mnemonic servitude to the rich. Against the recall companies.”
Irving stroked his long, curved nose. Revenge was such an exhausting pastime. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What else have you got?” asked the Omissioner. “Your family and career are gone.”
Irving narrowed his eyes. “What was that about you being rude, again?” “I’m just being straight with you, mate.”
Irving was silent as he turned it all over in his mind. Ondine, looking at him, her face creased with contempt and Eulalie, water-blurred eyes, uncomprehending at the creeping neglect of his fatherhood.
Eulalie.
If he could have been a good father, all the other failures wouldn’t have mattered. Everything else was bullshit. If only.
And he thought about the recall companies. Yeah—them, most of all. With their spacious, marble receptions and employees with perfect white teeth and franchises popping up in every city, every suburb even. On the back of his dreams, his experiences, his essence, commodified as a plaything for the lucky rich. They were the ones who had done all this, brought him to this, reduced him to this. Tore his family apart, for profit.
Irving fixed his gaze on Zau. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe revenge is exactly what I want.”
The Omissioner leaned towards him. “Yes. Good. Now, if this works out, you won’t remember doing it.”
“Perfect.”
“From a certain perspective, yes. I’ll fix it so you won’t remember this conversation. You also won’t remember that Thanks for the Memories stole your life, or that you got revenge for all they’ve done. What point then, Irving? How does this act exist, if you cannot remember it?”
Irving downed the last of his whisky, cleared his throat. “Let’s not get metaphysical here, Omissioner. The tree still falls in the forest. The world still exists outside the boundaries of my skull. And if I make these motherfuckers pay, well they are going to pay.”
Zau nodded, eyes twinkling. “Good. You’re going to have to go to Thanks for the Memories, have the propriety product you are re-remembering wiped, and sell them one more legit memory.”
Irving shook his head immediately. “No. I’m done with it. They can take back Luna Park, but no more. I’ve lost too much of myself—you’ve just got through telling me I’m going to end up a retard.”
“Dementia.”
“Whatever. I’ve done enough damage. Time to draw a line under it.”
“Just one more, mate. It’s the only way to do it. This lunch you had recently, where your wife talked about Luna Park, it has to go.”
“Why?”
“Because it is part of a mnemonic loop that will keep sending you back in time to Luna Park, and forward in time to me, here. We need to snip it out, cover our tracks.”
Irving opened his mouth to say no, but the image came of Ondine, looking at him from across the table, her expression a mixture of sadness and pity. He rubbed at his eyes with his palms. “Yeah. Maybe that is one memory I could do without.”
“Good, mate, good,” said the Omissioner, eyes shining. “Now, they’ll be uploading more than a visual recording from your pin and a memory print from your cerebral cortex. They’ll be uploading a project I’ve been working on for a long time. An offensively expensive virus I’ve commissioned, one that will bypass—”
Irving held up hand. “I don’t care what it is, Omissioner, just so long as it works.”
“Oh, it will work. When they take your memory, the virus will plug straight into the Kandel-Yu machine. It will ensure that every customer after you experiences an immediate decline in the release of certain proteins crucial to longterm memory formation. They will suffer anterograde amnesia—everything that happens after their trip to Thanks for the Memories will be lost.”
“They’ll still have memory pins.”
“Yes, yes, they’ll still have exo-memory. That’s why it’s such a cracker—it won’t become immediately apparent. Not before hundreds, even thousands have been exposed. Those infected will be increasingly reliant on a computer to tell them what day it is, where they work, whether or not they ate lunch, who their new friends are, the names of their children. They’ll keep going back to recall companies, buying more memories, infecting more Kandel-Yu machines. We do this right, the whole system of memories trickling up to the rich, of the desperate selling off chunks of their own soul, will be broken.”
Irving laughed without humour. “And here I was thinking I’d never achieve anything in this life.”
Zau watched Irving through the glass, doing a stunned kind of shuffle, following his vulture nose down the sidewalk.
“Your insider at the recall centre,” said Zau. “She chose well.”
“Yes,” replied Qiang from behind the reception desk. “She knows a hopeless case when she sees one.”
“He’s better than hopeless.” Zau continued to watch Irving walk down the street. “He’s the utterly irredeemable still yearning for redemption.”
Qiang waited until Irving had disappeared from sight. “Mister Kupfermann said you’d come to an agreement and that he wasn’t to be charged for the session.”
Zau looked over at him. “Charge him triple.”
“Triple?”
“Yeah. He won’t remember what it’s for, and I’ve told his exo-memory to hide it from him. Plus—” the old man smiled, his eyes sparkling “—it’s for a good cause.”
The doors to Thanks for the Memories wouldn’t open. Distracted by the glare of the sun, Irving had missed the red neon sign flashing CLOSED next to the entrance.
“Exo-memory, why is Thanks for the Memories closed? What day is it?”
“Thursday,” whispered the implant. “A media release by the parent company, released nine days ago, stated that this franchise was not located in a profitable area, and was consolidating its branches to maximize economic returns for shareholders. However, multiple sources on the freewave have contradicted this, theorizing that the closure is related to several recent high-profile cases of amnesia. Shall I put the most-read article from each perspective up on-retina?”
“No, no, I don’t care about the details.”
Irving pursed his lips. This was a nuisance. Just a couple more sales and he would hit the target he’d set himself. Fifteen million and he’d take Ondine out for dinner, reveal his newfound wealth and success. Just a couple more sales were all he needed to win his wife and daughter back.
“Exo-memory.”
“Yes, Mister Kupfermann?”
“Give me directions to the nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise.”