Stillness in Memory
Irina is in one of the Doric’s armored cars, stuck in traffic on her way to Fant?me. Picking at the armrest, she once again checks her implant’s logs and once again finds it unbreached, as she knew she would, for in fact it’s unbreachable, its defenses exaggerated beyond all necessity. It’s like a locked-room mystery—no one breached her implant, and she’s never transferred data off of it, and yet her memories have found their way out into the world.
She remembers Cromwell’s somewhat exaggerated interest, and it occurs to her to blame him, and it seems like he must be in some way involved, but there isn’t enough evidence to convict. Also, if he’d been so keen on getting his hands on her memories, why bother having her talk to his AI? She must be missing information.
She looks up Lederer’s Vancouver gallery on her phone. It’s just months old, owned by a pretty couple in their mid-thirties, and a quick search on their names brings up the sale of their tech company and the consequent access of wealth and their many subsequent seed-stage investments and a stalled attempt to produce independent films and their practiced smiles shining from the society blogs and in other blogs they’re nearly naked on the coarse grey beaches of Franz Josef Land for that huge annual week-long rave where they burn the wicker giant and there’s a pervasive sense that they’re searching quite desperately for the next source of meaning in their lives. She could imagine them locking on to the idea of recorded memory as art, if only for its novelty, but they don’t seem so substantial, and she doubts they’d have the nerve to face the inevitable counterattack.
There’s a lingering sense of their emptiness, and of their need to find some new way to connect, and then she says, “Oh!” for all at once she knows what happened, or in any case the channel by which her memories escaped her control. She clenches her fists but there’s nothing to be done, at least not for now, so she lets herself remember.
The clinic on the Malibu cliffs had walls of thick green glass. Sea fog hung in the air, diffusing the light. Looking down from the cliff edge, the surf’s violence was incredible, white water roaring over huge prisms of stone, the colossal wreckage of some recent collapse. Behind her, crablike drones with bodies of scoured copper moved cautiously through the brown grass, pausing only to disinter the roots of non-native plants. She’d heard that they were dumping these drones in the foothills, there to wander—robust and solar-powered, they would, over the decades, shift the ecology back toward how it was.
“If you’re ready, Ms. Sunden,” said the doctor in the lobby.
“Aren’t you afraid the cliff will collapse,” she said, “and drop you into the sea?”
“That’s an inevitability, ma’am. But it’s suitable, don’t you think? A constant reminder of our fragility, here, of all places? In any case, the geologists tell us that the rock will last for at least a hundred years. Everything has its time.”
She had come to help Constantin die.
Constantin’s father had built the dikes around Athens and, as far as she could tell, most of the rest of modern Greece. Handsome, affable, dissolute Constantin; he’d studied law half-heartedly, and then, in his early twenties, found his true vocation in high alpine skiing, and, later, BASE jumping. One August evening he’d put on a jet-black nylon wingsuit, surplus from German special forces, and launched himself from a Swiss mountainside into the fading air over a narrow valley in the Jura; he remembered the silence, he said, how his shadow had flirted with him, hovering close or far as the terrain rose and fell, but he didn’t remember hitting the updraft—later, he would learn that it was the exhalation from one of the hidden caverns where the Swiss cloistered their attack planes—or the fall, or the long tumble over the granite boulders, the dense grasses, the tiny reticulated streams.
They’d put a chip in his arm, when he was a child, that scanned his vital signs once a second. Noting their collapse, the chip sent an alert, annotated with his GPS and the elapsed time since cardiac arrest, first to the family office, then to the Swiss montane police.
Four hours later he was in an acute trauma clinic in Bern. The doctors, despairing of the damage to his skull, formally notified his father of their decision to end life support. His father wrecked his office in his newly renovated Proven?al villa, then sought advice. His wealth opened doors, dissolved obstacles, and soon his attorneys were ordering the Swiss doctors to stabilize their patient pending his transfer to the care of the surgeons of Ars Memoria, LLC, already en route from Seattle. Twenty-six hours later Constantin opened his eyes, the twenty-fourth recipient of the Memoria implant, the fourteenth to wake from anesthesia.
“I have a request. Something intimate,” he said, eleven years later, as she sat by his bed, the glass walls darkening against the Malibu sun as it slipped toward the hemisphere of sea. He looked spent, in his web of tubes of blood and worse, as though he’d died weeks ago and was in the process of being embalmed. He’d taken drugs, he’d said, to stay lucid a little longer, so he could wait for her.
“Name it,” she said, squeezing his hand, afraid it was sex, and would that even work, now, but the door had a lock, and there were worse things.
“I don’t want to be alone, when it happens, and it’s happening soon.”
“I’m here,” she said, knowing it for a slight thing, but all she had to offer.
“Will you open your memory to me?”
First she did nothing, thinking of her other memory, that bright and inviolate core of self, but in his need he was like a child afraid of the dark (but rightly afraid, she thought, for the great night is about to swallow you whole, and there is nothing more to be done about it), so she turned on her implant’s wireless. Every device in the room became a beacon. His implant was trying to connect, once a second, every second, and as she accepted the connection the world became informed by crippling weariness and stark fear of the imminence of the end and the pale, worried woman at his bedside clutching his withered hand and beginning to cry.