The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.
The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as complete and accurate as a high-res photo of that moment would’ve been.
But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.
She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.
Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.
She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.
Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.
Paige let the image freeze again.
Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.
Perfect.
To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.
She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.
In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.
To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.
What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.
Paige moved forward into the doorway.
She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.
She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.
She took a step into the room. Then another.
He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.
Another step, and another.
She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.
Another step.
Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.