I was nervous on the drive back to my apartment, too nervous to talk. But not nervous in the same way I was when I lingered in my classroom, hoping to avoid Ryan and his antagonistic remarks. A good-nervous, if there is such a thing. Yes, I think there must be. An anticipatory, hopeful, good-nervous.
I pulled into the apartment complex lot and found a spot close to the door. “I live here,” I said.
Daniel squinted up at the building. “Alone?”
“There are thirty units, so obviously…oh, but my apartment? Yes. It’s just me.” I got him inside without saying anything else awkward, but the temperamental lock took an extra few tries to open due to all the nervousness, despite the fact that the anxiety was good. When we opened the door to my apartment, though, the first thing I saw was a brick of bulk single-ply toilet paper in the middle of the kitchen floor. I edged it toward the cupboards with my foot, although it was so big, shoving it to one side didn’t make much of a difference in how much relative space it was taking up. Plus there’d be another brick of paper products in the hall. Daniel closed the door behind him and took in the room for a moment, not just the giant cube of TP, but the dishes piled in the sink, and the recycling by the door, and the disassembled mnemography cap. Seeing it now as he must see it, I doubted the wisdom in bringing him back to my place. His house had been casual, but much tidier overall, and cleaner, too. If the mess bothered him, he didn’t say anything. He just sagged into the only empty kitchen chair…and then propped his feet on the shrink-wrapped brick like it was a totally natural thing to do. I hung up my coat, moved some mail off another chair, and joined him at the table.
“Is lucid mneming even possible?” he asked me.
I’d been so worried about saying or doing the wrong thing—sexually, that is—that I hadn’t given any additional thought to the fraudulent mnem demo. I recalled the set-up as it had been, a MemoryStar and a hub, and then I tried to work backward and visualize what sort of configuration might have actually resulted in a lucid mnem, swapping components, adding and subtracting, rewiring. I thought through forty-seven variations, but forty-two wouldn’t work at all, and none of the remaining five would allow the hippocampus to process the mnem differently than any of the other current systems. “If you were consciously aware of the unreality of the mnem,” I said, “then it would fall apart.” That, I could picture: pixels raining down, like the cigarettes falling from his mangled pack in the parking lot, flat and stilted, nothing but a stream of colors and codes.
“Yeah.” He picked up an insulated coil from the disassembled cap and twirled it between his fingers. “The shitty thing is, I knew that. Or I would have known that, if I hadn’t got myself all wound up.”
“Because you thought you could use the technology to help Big Dan.”
He tensed up. Dr. Bergman would probably tell me I’d been too blunt.
“Even if it did work,” I went on, “giving Big Dan conscious control of his mnem seems like it could potentially make things worse. If keeping his false memories is his cognitive priority, he’d be likely to create additional evidence to support those memories, not refute them.”
Daniel jumped up out of his seat. The giant block of toilet paper rustled. “I need a smoke. Do you have a balcony, or…?”
“You can smoke in here.” I didn’t care. I’d let my second-last girlfriend smoke in my apartment, and I hadn’t liked her anywhere near as much as I liked Daniel.
He didn’t seem to believe me, even when I found him a clean tuna can from the recycling to use for an ash tray. Then he insisted on opening a window. Really cold air rushed in, but I decided not to mention it, in case he decided smoking was more important than staying there with me, and he left so he could have his nicotine.
He perched on the chair and smoked in long, punishing inhalations, scowling. And finally, releasing a long stream of smoke, he said, “Maybe Big Dan’ll never let it go. My mother—she was the love of his life. Can’t figure why, either. But she was. Left him—left us both—because she couldn’t stand to see him doing something he enjoyed with his time. Mnemography. She was jealous of a fucking technology. So jealous that when her sabotage didn’t pan out, she up and left him.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “And without her constant need for attention and her unending stream of criticism? He thrived.”
“I don’t understand what your mother has to do with it.”
“Haven’t you heard? Jeannie Schroeder is the center of the universe.” He lit another cigarette and laughed, but not like it was funny. Smoke puffed from his nostrils. “Sorry. Jeannie Sinclair, now. Except in Big Dan’s brain.”
“I still don’t—”
“Fine—I’ll spell it out for you. I authored a mnem that I thought would make people feel fantastic. But when I make mnems I stack my pixels loose. Abstract, almost. Like I’m the Jackson Pollock of memorysmithing. And out of this paint-storm of memory, my dear old dad, test-driving the packet for me, explores what would happen if the love of his life—gone five blissfully successful years—had never left him. And then…the goddamn memory goes persistent.”
I thought about that for a long while. The idea of crafting a mnem so loosely was intriguing…but I suspected that wasn’t really the point of the story. “Smithing a mnem to be vague, letting the subject assemble its particulars from his thoughts and desires…maybe that’s not lucid mneming. But it’s a lot more personal than Business Tycoon, or Love Connection, or any of those other predictable standard cartridges on the market.”
“Personal? That’s one way to look at it. Personal…or a fucking time bomb.”
My immediate reaction was that it didn’t make sense for the personalization to be the cause of the persistence, though I’d need to backtrack and double-check to verify the path of my logic. The intimacy of the mnem might generate a higher level of emotion—maybe trigger other, similar memories—but even so, plenty of mnems were emotionally charged, therefore it was no reason for the hippocampus to activate and encode the experience to long-term memory. “Was he the only one to test it?”
“No.”
“How many others?”
Daniel stared out the window a long while, and then eventually shrugged.
“Estimate,” I prompted, “if you have to. How many?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Plenty, really. If several other people tried the packet and none of them suffered—”
“You know what? Drop it. Okay? I can’t…I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You tested it yourself though, right? And maybe other—”
He stood abruptly. I’d been hovering over him, questioning him, and now he was right up against me, with me backed against the sink. Maybe his temper would flare like it had at the expo. He was more of a seether than a shouter, but even so, the last thing I wanted was to make him angry. When he spoke, though, his voice was gentle. “Please. Let’s talk about something else.”
“What?”
“Anything.” He stepped back, picked up the silicone headpiece, and shrugged. “This. Half the connections are missing—are you replacing it with something else, or fitting it for more radio waves?”
“Neither. I’m rewiring it to see if the whole brain is necessary to control it or not.”
“But…why?”
“It occurred to me, when I was trying to visit you during my canceled classes—this was before I met you in subjective reality—that I wished the technology didn’t take a hundred percent of my attention. It’s like that expression, sleeping with one eye open. If I could sherpa with half my brain, that would leave other parts of my awareness free to watch for…to keep track of time. Make sure I didn’t run late.”
Daniel gave a low whistle. “Could you imagine? I’d hate to be the poor sap going under the nitrous with a sherpa who’s only paying attention with half a brain. But just think how useful it would be to keep some connection with the real world while you’re pegging someone in and out.” He flexed the silicone cap. “I don’t have anyone to talk about this stuff with. Not anymore. Larry doesn’t have the training, Carlotta’s sick of it, and my dad…I don’t have the heart to talk about it with my dad.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t I just say—?”
“He has a persistent mnem, you’ve told me that several times. But that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in mnemography anymore. He looked like he was enjoying himself at the expo. And I don’t think he was only humoring me when we discussed my job over dinner.”
He placed the cap back on the table. “Look, I’m shitty company right now, and you shouldn’t have to put up with me. Drive me home?”
Anything but that. Even though he’d stated what he wanted, clearly and unequivocally, I couldn’t let our first date end on such a sad note. Instead of reaching for my keys, I reached for him instead.
I wasn’t expecting him to sag against me, to press his face against my shoulder, but I knew enough to lean into the stiff embrace when it happened. Crying? No, he wasn’t like Beth. He didn’t have intense emotional peaks that depressurized in a tearful release. I understood this about him because we’d met in mnem, where I’d seen the way he’d thought of himself with all the parts of his brain…and I saw it with all the parts of my brain, especially those parts I don’t normally comprehend. He was weary. Exhausted. But he would gather his strength and keep marching on. Slogging through a battle that would never be won.
That battle was subjective, though. He thought he’d ruined his father, but I wasn’t convinced he was even responsible…and I wasn’t so sure Big Dan was damaged, either. Just changed.
I leaned my cheek into his hair. The buzz cut was short enough to prickle. Nothing at all like hugging Beth, or even my second-last girlfriend who was also a smoker. I eased my arms around him and cataloged all the dozens of ways it was different, so different—prickly and hard where women were soft, broad across the back, and far taller than any woman I’ve ever known, except maybe in high heels or platform shoes, and really Beth was the only one who dressed up to that extent.
Social mores are strange. According to convention, people are supposed to say they want to be alone when what they really want is comfort. Maybe it was different for men in a romantic situation, and Daniel actually did want to go home. It didn’t feel that way, though, when he sighed against my neck. I’d never considered that a sigh could sound masculine. Our thighs brushed as he began to relax against me, and hopefully to come around to the idea of staying. My hands ranged down his back, and even through the army jacket, he felt fascinatingly angular. His arm slid around my waist tentatively, and I let my hands drop lower, sizing up the narrowness of his hips.
“I’m sorry.” He pulled away before I finished analyzing the differences.
“For what?”
He turned to the table and scraped the burning tobacco off the end of the second cigarette, then balanced the partially-smoked remainder against the side of the aluminum can. “I’d hate to…take advantage.”
“Take advantage?” For many of us on the spectrum, anger flares hot, seemingly out of nowhere. And now I was raising my voice, me, the one who hates being yelled at. “How is it taking advantage to bring me to an expo, and talk to me like a peer, and…and…touch me?”
“Whoa. Okay. Don’t read into it. I have no idea what the hell I even meant.”
Neither did I. But the echo of Dr. Bergman telling me Daniel was taking advantage—that he was violating my boundaries—was making me doubt that I understood what was going on. Yet, I was so certain that I did. All I wanted was to recapture the moments we’d shared that day. Small moments to him, no doubt. Sitting at the garage with our knees touching. The taste of red candy on his lips. The ticket taker tearing the stubs, and handing them both to Daniel, because she understood we were together, him and me.
Like regular people. Not that I wanted to be neurotypical, which I didn’t. Evolutionarily speaking, neurodiversity is a good thing, plus I’d hate to be as limited as most people I meet. But that didn’t mean I was immune to the feeling that despite my gifts and abilities, sometimes I didn’t quite measure up.
I wished we were still in mnem. Things would make sense so easily there. But a mnem machine of my own was way beyond my budget, and it would be inconvenient to drive to Adventuretech every time a conversation turned challenging. Daniel had a T-23 at home…but Big Dan would probably be there, and the sight of him would just make Daniel sad, whether any false memories came up or not.
“Taking advantage implies that you’re pressing me to do something I don’t want to do,” I attempted to explain, “something to my detriment. And that isn’t the case.” I took one of his hands in mine, then the other, and stood there with him, face to face. “I like you. And I hope you still like me.”
“I do.”
“Good.” I was so anxious I could feel my pulse pounding in my throat, but I pulled him toward me with both hands anyway, right up against me, chest to chest with our elbows extended stiffly and hands clasped beside our hips, and I angled my head so our noses weren’t in the way. And I pressed my lips to his.
Even without the rasping stubble, his mouth still didn’t feel like a woman’s mouth. All the research I’d done—the animated gifs, and the bears and twinks and hookups, and ManMeat’s creamhole—it wasn’t what I’d been searching for, not like this single, gentle kiss, the smell of cigarettes and shaving cream and winter clinging to old canvas. My breath caught as if he’d startled me, though he hadn’t, not when it was all gentle and restrained, and I could have pulled away at any time simply by taking a single step back. Something internal might have surprised me, though. Even if I hadn’t pieced together exactly what it could be.
He drew away when I gasped. A sharp inhalation could mean many things—both good and bad. I pulled him forward, determined to strip away the ambiguity as best I could, and when his lips yielded to mine, I eased my tongue into his mouth. Seeking what? I wasn’t sure, but his tongue slipped alongside mine, and his breathing sped, and I decided that was it, that was the response I’d been after. This pull between us couldn’t be only one way. It had to be mutual. Otherwise, what good was any of it?
Back at his place, on the couch in the basement, he’d been a lot more aggressive in touching me. At the time I was overwhelmed by the novelty of the experience. Now I found myself longing for it. I wanted him to run his hands over me now, to slide his fingers up the inseam of my jeans, to cup me through the denim and feel me swell. I wanted it so intensely, I ached for it. “We could go sit on the couch,” I said. I probably should have cleared the dirty dishes from it if I was going to invite Daniel over, but I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Or…the bed.”
He stared into my eyes—a really uncomfortable thing, but I couldn’t look away. Finally, he broke eye contact and said, “I don’t get laid these days, you know. You’d think it would be a no-brainer, a trusting young thing like you throws himself at me, offers me the chance to go where no man has gone before.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And then I close my eyes, and I see that stupid One-Armed Bandit jumping around. He’s making all that noise, doing that creepy dance. I remember the looks on the faces of all the mnemographers. Hope. Eager, slack-jawed, gullible hope. I probably had that same dumb look on my face, too. Everyone did. Except you.”
“It’s nearly impossible to mimic other people’s facial expressions and get it right. I’ve stopped trying.”
“That’s not it, Elijah. You were the only one they didn’t dupe.”
“And you were the first one to question the situation when I said it was a set-up.”
Talking wasn’t getting us anywhere. When women are upset, they usually expect you to hug them and stroke them and pry out whatever’s bothering them so they can air their feelings aloud. But when I get upset, I usually don’t want to talk about it with anyone but Dr. Bergman, and sometimes not even her. I couldn’t really judge what Daniel might want based on the way I myself would react, though. Not outside mnem, when everything was surrounded by layers of nuance I simply wasn’t wired to perceive. I opened his army jacket, watching carefully, but I couldn’t quite read his expression. It was a scowl—I saw that much—and yet he didn’t seem to be angry with me. He let me slide the jacket off, anyway, and hang it from a kitchen chair. He let me slip my index fingers through his belt loops and pull him up against me. He let me press my mouth to his ear. “I really, really don’t want you to go home.”
“Okay.” He turned his head and brushed his lips along the side of my neck, and said against the skin, “Let’s go lie down.”