‘Other sapients do! There’s a shop right by ours where they install wireless headjacks. People come in and out of there all the time.’
Pepper shook her head hard. ‘You’ve never seen what those people turn into. Full-time jackers are massively fucked up. They can’t focus. They can’t talk right. Some of them don’t come back out to the real world at all. I’ll take you to a jack den sometime, if it’ll get you off this kick. People rent bunks by the tenday, complete with a cable for their brain and a nutrient pump to keep them alive. A lot of them never leave. They just lie down and fade away. It’s disgusting.’ She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, as if summoning words. ‘I know you wouldn’t run into the same problem, but you live in a modder community. You can’t be connected to the Linkings for the same reason you couldn’t keep the name Lovelace. If you run around knowing everything instantly without your social skills being shit, somebody is going to catch on. Somebody will realise that you’re not just crazy smart. You will slip, and they will catch it, and they will take you apart.’
Sidra’s pathways crackled with frustration. The kit tugged its hair in kind. ‘Pepper, my memory banks are filling up. I am not like you. I don’t have a brain that grows new folds and synapses whenever I learn something. You – you have an almost infinite capacity to learn things. I don’t.’
‘Sidra, I know—’
‘You’re not listening to me. I have a fixed limit on hard memory. I was designed to have constant Linking access at all times. I wasn’t meant to store everything locally. I’m going to have to start deleting things at some point. Any time I learn someone’s name, any time I’m taught a new skill, I’m going to have to pick and choose which of my memories to keep. I’m going to have to tear pieces of myself out. You say you understand, but you don’t. You have no idea what this is like. You have no idea how this feels.’ Her words were coming out loud, fast, barely processed. She could’ve stopped herself. She could’ve brought her voice back down, slowed her pace. She didn’t want to. She wanted to be loud. She wanted to yell. She knew it was unproductive, but right now, it felt good.
‘Okay, I don’t know exactly how it feels, but I get it.’ Pepper was getting loud now. Somehow, that felt good, too. ‘What you don’t seem to get is that you’re downloading things you have no need for. You wonder about an Aandrisk proverb or something, and an hour later, you’re filing away half the fucking Reskit library. You don’t need all that stuff.’
‘Do you need all your memories? Do you need to remember every song you’ve ever heard, every sim you’ve ever played?’
‘I don’t always remember. I have to look stuff up all the time.’
‘Yes, but then you remember. The memory’s still there. Do you know what that would be like, to download a song, delete the file, and then hear it again, thinking I’ve never heard it before?’
‘Sidra . . . stars. All I’m saying is that you need to be more picky. Log a one-line text reminder that you heard the song. Don’t download everything that musician’s ever made.’ Pepper frowned, chewing her thumbnail. ‘We could get you a hud.’
‘No,’ Sidra said. Reading was clunky and slow. That wasn’t what she wanted. That wasn’t what she needed.
‘Don’t say no before you’ve tried it. You could read the Linkings just like everyone—’
‘I am not like everyone else. I can’t be like everyone else.’
‘You need,’ Pepper said, in a tone that meant the conversation was over, ‘to try.’ She sighed again, glancing at the wall clock. ‘And we need to get to the shop.’
Sidra pressed into the corner, fuming. Why was she so angry? This wasn’t fair to Pepper, she knew that. Pepper was just trying to keep her safe, and she’d done so much for her. They’d ordered dinner from Fleet Fry the night before, and Pepper had got an assortment of appetisers and one of each kind of dipping sauce so that Sidra could trigger new images. That memory file made her feel guilty in the context of the current conversation, but . . . but the hell with it. She might have to delete that memory file altogether if she didn’t find a way to deal with this.
‘I don’t want to go to work today,’ Sidra said. She sounded like a child. She didn’t care.
‘Okay,’ Pepper said. ‘All right, fine. What are you going to do instead?’
‘I don’t know.’ The kit crossed its arms. ‘I don’t know. I could clean.’
‘Don’t clean. Go out. Or stay in, whatever. Just . . . do something that feels good.’
Sidra moved her gaze away from Pepper. The guilt associated with the previous night’s memory file was bleeding into everything else. This conversation was making her feel guilty, too. Why was she acting this way? Why couldn’t she just get used to the way things were? What was wrong with her? ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered.