Welcome to Forever E-Book

Nathan Tavares

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 580

Beschreibung

A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution. For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion. Fox is a memory editor – one of the best – gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Centre for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe. Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over. As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Verse One The Book of the Dead

One Field of Reeds

Two Flashes

Three Therapies

Four Watercolor

Five The Old Kingdom

Six Canned Memories

Seven Barred

Verse Two Embalming

Eight Temporary Side-Effects

Nine Monumoments

Ten Introductory Editing Level

Eleven Ten-and-A-Half Barred, Again

Eleven Negative Confessions

Twelve Power Over Water

Thirteen For Giving Breath

Fourteen Training Module

Fifteen Intermediate Period

Sixteen Budding

Seventeen Standard Memory Template 36

Eighteen Euphoria Special

Nineteen Meeting Parameters

Twenty Guarding Against The Loss of the Heart

Verse Three Weighing of the Heart

Twenty-One Transposing

Twenty-Two Editor’s Notes

Twenty-Three Admin Mode

Twenty-Four Suite Like Honey

Twenty-Five Coming Forth by Day

Twenty-Six Hunger

Twenty-Seven De-Fragged

Twenty-Eight Foxtrot

Twenty-Nine Grave Robbers

Thirty Birds

Thirty-One Links

Thirty-Two Parallel Memory Branch

Verse Four to Escape The Slaughter Place

Thirty-Three Recall, Recognition, Relearning

Thirty-Four Editor Template 17

Thirty-Five Field of Memories

Thirty-Six Scalpel

Thirty-Seven The New Kingdom

Thirty-Eight Bargaining

Thirty-Nine Barge of the Sun

Forty Closing Rites

Coda Excisions

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PRAISE FOR

WELCOME TO FOREVER

“Tavares reminds us that no matter how far technology advances, human connection will always bind us. This is a sharp and aching portrait of love painted with a deft hand.”

Al Hess, author of World Running Down

“A hugely impressive feat of layered narratives and big ideas, told with an even bigger heart. I couldn’t put it down.”

Stark Holborn, author of Ten Low

“A thrilling vision of the future and a poignant tale of love and marriage, Welcome to Forever is impossible to forget. Tavares keenly engages with contemporary conversations about immortality and identity, and weaves a heartbreakingly beautiful story about the lengths people go for the ones they love.”

Victor Manibo, author of The Sleepless

“Tavares does what all great writers of science fiction do best. He takes our hopes, fears and anxieties about the way we live today, skewers them to the page and makes the reader watch, helpless and captivated as they wriggle underneath his touch... Welcome to Forever is a work of artistic maturity, dazzling imagination and a horrible sense of foresight over what might come to pass—if we let it happen.”

Chris McCrudden, author of the Battlestar Suburbia series

PRAISE FOR

NATHAN TAVARES

“A very beautiful, tender portrait of a romance, its unremarkable mundanity made precious against the backdrop of so many iterations... It’s a delightful, spiraling, idiosyncratic book that uses the language and techniques of filmmaking to structure a more interesting reading experience.”

The New York Times

“A powerful and touching love story.”

The Times

“Populated by some of the best sci-fi has to offer... The multiverse trope offers and easy and entertaining vehicle for very deep philosophical lessons about what it takes to grow up at any age.”

New Scientist

“Tavares hits the gas, sending the plot rocketing through dozens of fascinating possible Earths. The epic love story forms an intense emotional core and Hayes’s conversational narration charms. Anyone looking for queer sci-fi should check this out.”

Publishers Weekly

WELCOMETOFOREVER

Also by Nathan Tavares and available from Titan Books

A Fractured Infinity

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Welcome to Forever

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360409

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364315

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2024 Nathan Tavares

Nathan Tavares asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Eamonn

VERSE ONE

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

“We are sparks. Our experiences, our memories, are electro-chemical impulses dancing from neuron to neuron, across the synaptic divide. These impulses may be mapped and influenced, written and sung out in epics. We are stories.”

—Aset,Philosophies of Memory and Laws of Applied Sahusynics, First Edition

*   *   *

Our story’s not so much an epic—I had him and I lost him.

Was he ever really there? Or was he a ghost?

And how well can you really know someone, anyway?

The Memory Options Specialist doesn’t give a crap about my questions, and stories, and blubbering about how I just saw him, and now. And now. I get it, the waiting room’s full of grief bags like me.

She hands me a tablet. The bright screen stabs my rusty eyes.

“Look over the levels,” she says. “We’re here to help with any editing-related questions you might have.”

Happiness is a Choice™.

ONE

FIELD OF REEDS

The staff gave me a picture of me and someone I’m supposed to remember. Every morning, I’m supposed to look at the picture as soon as I wake up, then close my eyes and feel for the memories. I’m supposed to imagine that my shredded brain is like a tree. If you hack a tree down to the stump, new shoots will grow, the Head Therapist told me on my first day here. He called it “coppicing” and blabbed about nature’s ability to heal.

Mostly I just need to pee.

I don’t remember the guy in the picture frame on the worn wooden desk in my room with its creaky floors in this weird old house. I don’t even remember how I got here. Curving lines shaved into one side of his buzzed head, another slashed line in one eyebrow. Bright, gold-ringed brown eyes crinkle at the corners from his smile. A tropical-print shirt unbuttoned to show his brown chest and gold chain. One hand holding a glass of white wine, the other arm draped across the shoulders of a guy with windblown hair, dark eyes, and a sharp nose. White linen shirt against brown skin, the sloppy smile of someone a few glasses of wine in. This guy in white is supposed to be me, and the other is supposed to be my husband. We’re on a rooftop overlooking the golden lights of a city at sunset, though hold a gun to my head and I couldn’t tell you where.

This will all come back in time, the therapists tell me. Close your eyes. Breathe deep. Picture the new shoots of your memories bursting up toward the sun, and when you step back there’s a you-shaped topiary in a garden of paradise, and you’ll remember everything.

I’ve got no idea how I remember words like “topiary” but not my husband. None of the therapists here can give a straight answer why, just stuff like you’ve been through trauma and your memories will heal in time. And have you tried journaling about this?

No topiary this morning. Instead, I make my bed in my room like we’re supposed to. The clock by my bed tells me it’s just past eight in angry, red numbers. We only have clocks in our rooms—the gongs keep us on schedule in the manor and over the grounds. I came here with nothing, apparently. There’s only the wardrobe filled with dumpy gray sweat suits, with my name—Fox—embroidered over the heart in blue letters, an empty writing desk, and a chest of drawers filled with socks and underwear. I wriggle into one of the sweat suits, then take a leak in the bathroom down the hall that I share with three other residents, and brush my teeth.

In the mirror over the sink, I look like the me in the picture, just a little pudgier and with more lines around the mouth. I don’t feel old, though my face says, you’re here to pick up the kids for the carpool, Dad.

The therapists get on me about my morning mirror affirmations. Have you been practicing? Have you been really feeling them? “How about you tell me?” I tossed at Flo, the Facilities Manager and my favorite staff member here, during yesterday’s intro session. You already told me about a husband I don’t know, and a life I don’t remember, so you must know if I’m the kind of person to pep-talk himself.

“You want to question everything, and that’s great,” Flo said in her kindergarten-teacher voice with her poufy blonde hair, gentle blue eyes behind glasses, and a pink cardigan over her lavender scrubs. She’s the one who rings the gong, keeping us in time, while dipping into her cardigan pockets for strawberry candies. “You’re getting to know yourself again. And that self is suspicious and sarcastic at times. A wonderful discovery!” Instead of getting mad, she leaned forward, the keys on the lanyard around her neck bouncing against her chest. “Bend into that. Bend into the questions. Question the questions. That’s why you’re here.”

Sure, Flo. I’ll go with the flow.

Talking to myself in the mirror is about as batshit as the other stuff the therapists have us do—the meditations, and the singing crystal bowl sessions, and the trust-falls—so, what the hell. Deep breath.

“Your name is Fox,” I say, still surprised every time the stranger’s lips move in the mirror. “You will remember. You are special, and you are loved. And you deserve to remember.”

*   *   *

Down the short hallway and the wooden staircase, I join the line of people in gray sweat suits waiting on the faded floral carpet outside the sunroom. The woman with blue-streaked hair at the back of the line turns and nods a hi to me. Her name’s Minou—it’s embroidered over her heart just like mine—and I know from yesterday’s group session that she remembers when she was growing up she had a cat named Sprinkles. When she was done sharing her new memory, Seth, the Head Therapist, thanked her and nodded to us. Which was our cue to tell Minou in one voice, we are memories, and memories are we.

People dump their memories all over each other here. Fredericka, who pops up behind me in line, doesn’t let me even fire off a good morning before she says she won first place in shot put at a track meet when she was fourteen. Up ahead, Pierluigi’s talking about how bright the sky was over his childhood home on the Ligurian Sea. We all came here in varying degrees of head-fuck, so Seth says it’s important to share happy memories when they come back to us. He calls it Radical Remembrance.

“I honor your memory,” I say to Fredericka, still feeling dumb about the line that Seth says we’re supposed to say back. She nods a thank-you.

Seth and the therapists in their different-colored scrubs are big on scripted lines. And hippy-dippy therapy concepts like Radical Remembrance, and Memory Mapping, and Moving Meditation. And, I guess, alliteration.

The glass door to the sunroom opens and the line moves. My eyes fall to the carpet, willing memories to bloom in my head like the worn pink roses. We’re supposed to spend our morning focusing on the things we remember, as prep for our Memory Mapping sessions. Or, in my case, the things the therapists tell me I’ll remember.

My name is Fox.

I’m a memory editor. One of the best, so they say.

There was an attack on New Thebes. A bomb exploded in the city center and a weird signal torched the memories of everyone in the blast radius.

I survived the attack—barely, if you can count having basically zero memory as surviving—but my husband, Gabe, didn’t. Too close to the bomb and his memories turned to dust.

So I checked myself into the Field of Reeds Center for Memory Recovery, apparently. For the staff to try to recover my damaged memory code. And to find a way to bring Gabe back.

I wrack my brain for any trace of those memories and come up empty. There’s stuff I remember, of course. I’m not one of the residents with the yellow bracelets who the therapists have to hover around. Who remember so little that, according to Flo, they’re a danger to themselves. My first solo session with Seth, he talked about core memory. How Alzheimer’s patients, before the cures, usually lost their recent memories first, leaving the older, deeper memories intact. He said it’s how I know how to walk and talk, and how things in the Center—in some woodsy part in the Western Massachusetts district of Kemet—are familiar. I remember being a kid and living for a while in New Thebes, my parents installing the little silver nub of the memory transmission node behind my left ear. I even remember starting work at NIL/E Technologies, the giant company behind memory and resurrection—rez for short—tech who runs this place, if I squint hard enough. You say NIL/E like the end of the word “denial,” I remember. And then a big anchor wraps around my neck with how I can remember the name of the place I worked but not my own husband.

I’m a dotted-line drawing of myself, hoping to remember enough to fill everything in.

I bury my hands in my pockets and dig into my thigh with my fingernails, just to yank me back to my body. I breathe past the anger, like Flo tells me. I’m supposed to be a reed swaying in the breeze when the anger hits, giving in and letting it blow past me.

I hold my breath until my lungs burn. Telling myself to give it time.

Gabe. The name tastes bright green, like the herbs from the garden where we pluck off dead leaves, and snip chives, and plant things as part of our therapy. We poke holes into the warm earth with our fingers, drop seeds inside, and cover the holes with dirt. Whispering grow, grow as much to the seeds as to our memories. His name feels like the grass on the big lawn, too. I asked Flo how in the hell I can feel a name and she shrugged and told me, hon, your brain is so shredded we’re just happy you’re not pissing yourself.

Then she went pale and asked me not to tell Seth she said that.

I stuck that one in my back pocket, just in case.

The line moves again and soon I’m the one waiting at the door with its glass panes covered with white fabric. When the door opens, J calls for me to come on in and my slippered feet sink into another floral carpet. In the sunroom, three stiff-backed chairs circle a low coffee table that’s dotted with crystal knickknacks and fancy china for morning tea. Misty painted landscapes on the walls are windows to somewhere else. Another set of glass double doors leads outside to a small brick courtyard, painted gold by the morning sun. The only thing that feels out of place is the steel reclining chair, mantis-like with how it’s leaned back, waiting to strike.

Another whoops-your-memory-is-mangled plothole: I asked Seth two days ago when I first got here and saw that chair how I could remember mantises but not my own name until the therapists reminded me, and he hit me with one of his easy smiles. Memory isn’t linear, he said. The wave knows it’s a part of the ocean.

Which is just about the politest way to tell me to shut up and stop asking so many questions.

J spins the chair and makes a show of dusting off the seat, giving me a short bow and hand-wave like, at your service. Like I’m here for a haircut and not a brain scan.

At least J tries.

“Mornin’,” they say, as sunny as their yellow scrubs.

“Looks like someone had their coffee.” I try out a smile and sink into the metal chair. I overheard one of the therapists yakking this to another one yesterday and thought I’d give it a go. “Did I say that right?”

J beams. “Bingo! Classic work-appropriate jokey-ness. A-plus.”

The sides of the metal chair squeeze a little. I push against the arms that are still warm from the last person in here for their scan. My third morning here, and my third time in this chair, I’ve learned not to jump when the clear visor from the headrest snaps over my face. Pink and purple lights dance across the visor, in time with the faint, high-pitched beeps blurring in my ears.

“The whole of your memory is your memorystream,” J says softly, somewhere behind me. “Watch it flow like a river. Unbroken and eternal, and reaching for the sea.”

J’s the only staff member besides Flo I’ve met so far who makes the scripted lines they all bust out—trustyour emotions, healing takes time, the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in astorm—sound like a prayer. At least starting the day by hanging out with J is starting to feel familiar. Comforting, almost, with their warm eyes, their straight-backed stocky body zipping around the sunroom, their bleached and cropped hair looking like someone dipped them upside down in butter.

And then we wait. More beeps, more lights darting like bees over my eyes. J unscrolls the digital screen of their Reeder by tapping the tube and flicking up their hand, and the display crackles to life. I remember carrying around my own identical device—a gold-capped crystal pipe that’s about the length and width of my forearm, with recessed keys and a digital screen—back at work, like all the therapists here. Maybe remember? From the digital display, a projection of thin branches bursts into the air between us. The spindly gray arms look made of ice, and so delicate that they’d snap if I touched them. A memorystream is supposed to look like a river with little creeks that branch off and rejoin the whole, they tell me, but mine looks like someone yanked the plug and sent just about all of the stream down the drain.

I try not to sink. Try. The visor snaps back into the chair’s headrest. J sidles up to me and tips their head at the projection.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Looks like we’ve got some slight budding here.” They raise their hands in the air and swipe, zooming in to one corner of the projection where a little nub looks the same to me as it did my first morning. “Maybe.”

I don’t know if the lie is okay if it’s meant to give me hope.

“Have you been doing your affirmations?” J asks.

“Ugh, yes.”

J playfully conks me on the shoulder with their Reeder.

“I don’t sense boundless gratitude at the wonders of creation in that ‘ugh,’ mister,” they say.

“Guilty. I’ll do better.”

Here is where I’m supposed to bounce out of this chair and give in to the process with a big smile slapped on my face, thankful—like Flo said—that I’m not pissing myself. But then the mystery of the picture of me and Gabe in my bedroom drags me down. I can hear Flo telling me to be like a reed bending in the wind.

I must’ve been bendier ten years ago. There’s white in my hair, now, and I can’t touch my toes. Doubt locks up the backs of my legs.

“How will I ever get my memories back?”

When I catch J’s eyes, their lips press together. “Memories are like scars,” they say, hugging their Reeder close. “Way down, in your neurons. In the deepest part of you. Nothing is ever really gone. It just takes time to get back.”

I really want to believe them. Seth says things like happiness is a choice, so at least for today I’ll choose to trust that I’m not going to be a dotted-line drawing of myself forever.

“I’ll wait, I guess.” I fumble out of the chair and head to the courtyard door.

“Let’s add another affirmation for you,” J calls. “‘I will be kind to myself. And let the process…’” They stare at me with searching eyes. “‘Process.’”

Out in the courtyard, I wince against the sunlight.

TWO

FLASHES

I don’t remember loving Gabe, but I remember losing him. Snippets of memories come at me in flashes like someone sliding shards of glass into my head. I wake up in the middle of the night in sweaty, twisted sheets. Flo says it’s because trauma really digs into the memorystream and hangs on tight.

I remember standing by a window in an apartment that must’ve been mine, looking out at a city. The closest buildings crowded like a row of teeth, connected by metal catwalks, with twinkling lights on fire escapes. Narrow streets that gave way to a wide-open city square of pink granite ringed by squat glass buildings and stone towers. A long rectangular pool in the middle of the square reflected the night sky, ending at a wide stairway that led to a white pyramid with a base as big as a city block. The pyramid rose a few hundred feet higher than the surrounding buildings, like a diamond against the night, capped by a digital screen. Blue lights trickled down the pyramid edges.

Some joking pros-and-cons list we made before moving into this place floated to me. Pro: Three blocks from all the action of the city square. Con: When you walk to the kitchen in your underwear at midnight for a glass of water, your office is staring at you.

Flash. Everything white.

The pyramid exploded. Weird, I had time to think, before the rolling white cloud, the roundhouse from a pissed-off god, launched me off my feet. I woke up on the floor, covered in broken glass, a high whine blasting through my head.

Red and blue flashes in the streets. Sirens and screams.

Skittering over broken glass. My phone flashing in my hands. Calling him, again and again, no answer. Just the eeeeeeee in my ears, drowning everything out. Blood in my eyes. Blood in my mouth.

Running through the streets and the crush of bodies, none of us knowing where we’re running. To the smoking crater that was once the city square, or away from it?

Grabbing the shoulders of the people I slam into. All of us caked with dirt and blood, wild-eyed. Have you seen him? Have you seen him?

Flash.

A news crawl on the screen in a gray waiting room. Not sure how I got there. Where there is. Memory virus. Neuro-terrorists. One anchor talks while the other beside her cries quietly. The weapon exploited the memory backup transmissions, using the company’s own technology against them. Customers’ memory backups were destroyed, even within the secure NIL/E servers, files replaced with some kind of scrambled code. And more as this story develops. The anchors don’t say final-death—because even in the decades since rez tech, those words are a night terror—but what else is it if your memory backup is scorched? Instead, they sniffle. Hug your loved ones tight,and…

Flash.

I’m in a training room and someone at the front is telling us something we all already know, that our parents told us when they had our nodes installed when we were kids.

The wireless memory transmissions are painless. Your memories are relayed to our servers every twelve hours, where they will be kept safe in case of critical damage to your vessel and/or node.

I’m running in the street again, dodging rubble. Cars on fire. Blurs that I can’t look at, because I know if I stop and look, I’ll see an arm. A leg. I hear voices in my head that aren’t mine. Or maybe it’s the leaked security comms recording that the news plays over and over again. Who knows. Time and memories blur all into each other.

—haltall transmissions until we can stabilize. Are you seeing this? Isolate the memorystreams of everyone at the square. Put them in quarantine. Priority one is keeping our servers safe. Those fuckers. Those fuckers think they can get us. We invented this tech. This is our codedamnedhouse—

My hearing is cranked up way too high in this sad, gray room. The overhead lights buzz like a jet engine. Someone is screaming. Edit to add: I’m that someone, screaming. A folding chair is in my hands and I throw it at one of the walls. Because they promised. They fucking promised that none of us would ever die. That none of us would have to say goodbye. And I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Gabe, and our separation was temporary—temporary until we could cool off—and now they’re telling me he’s gone.

I know the woman with the tired face and the steady eyes doesn’t deserve this, but neither do I. So she gets the screams and the tears and the begging. And the don’t you know who the fuck I am? I don’t know if I’m asking this or telling her.

Someone behind me jabs something sharp into my neck.

Flash.

In one of the folding chairs again in the sad, gray room. Night, this time. The tired woman is speaking but her words don’t match the movement of her lips. She’s being nicer than I deserve, than she has time for, with all the others in the waiting room outside.

We can offer you an envesseled approximation of your loved one while you wait for memory cleansing. Approximation. A husband skimmed from your memories—traits, habits, behavior—cobbled together. More you than him. Temporary. Hopefully. Though this virus is craftier than we first thought.

Or we can delete him. Your choice.

We are doing all we can. Terrible, yes, those monsters. No, they didn’t suffer. The blast was—take your time. Look over our new memory-editing levels for your Upgrade. Staff discount. We recommend the Euphoria Special.

THREE

THERAPIES

Seth looks like he’s on a beach vacation, in linen pants and a long-sleeved white shirt bright against his skin, not leading group therapy. Me and the three others in my group—Cohort, I’m told, because this place is jazzed over vocabulary—sit on folding chairs in a circle on the lawn in front of the brick patio, the bright morning sunlight blanketing down on us. Minou, Stash with the purple-dyed mustache, Chengmei with her laughing eyes and frizzy gray hair. There are fifty residents here, about half as many staff, and we all usually stick with our Cohort as we move through different therapies. To really foster trust, according to Seth. The sun glances off his shaved head at the opposite side of the circle from me. Behind him, birds glide over the marsh. The warm breeze smells like water and dirt.

The first morning I met him, after my tour of the manor, Seth told me he wasn’t just the Center’s Head Therapist, but also my Case Manager. Though he hoped I’d think of him as a friend. I’d managed to not immediately roll my eyes at him. The first thing I discovered about myself when I woke up here was Fox has zero appetite for bullshit. Maybe I should try that as an affirmation.

We start therapy sessions with a pop quiz. My third pop quiz this morning, since a solo breakfast in the dining room with its round tables, dead fireplace with a mantle dotted with landscape pictures, and big windows that overlook the rolling lawn and the marsh beyond. A therapist floats to each of us and hands us a Reeder, while Seth looks over the notebook he scribbles in during each session. Flo said with all the terminology they toss around here, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And they have to test my recall speed, anyway, to make sure I don’t have lasting brain damage.

The therapist’s screen asks me a question.

Which of the following statements are true?

a. Aset is the mother of memory.

b. Memories are discrete units of experience and may be edited or created using the sahu coding language pioneered by Aset.

c. The memorystream is the total collection of an individual’s chronological memories, often used interchangeably with “consciousness.”

d. All of the above.

I tap “d” and a happy bell dings from the device. Still, the therapist frowns.

“Faster, next time?”

“Sure.”

Once we have answered our Reeder quizzes, the therapists drift to other Cohorts on chairs and blankets on the lawn. Seth hits us with his big bro smile. I blank out for most of his opening sermon about how resilient the human mind is, and when I come to, Minou’s talking about how she remembers a cat she had a couple of years ago. She tells us about Cupcake while I stare at the blue streak in her hair that’s tucked behind one ear, so I don’t have to meet her eyes. A memory struggled to her through her half-sleep this morning, of orange air freshener and a little rough tongue across her fingertips. She squeezed her eyes shut until she could see the room with wire pens in the animal shelter where she and her wife had adopted the cat. Seth nods a lot and occasionally takes notes. Out of all the cats, Cupcake was the only one to walk over to the door of the pen to say hi to Minou and her wife. And that was when they knew.

When she’s done talking, she looks down at her knees and wipes her nose. It’s so quiet that I can hear the water lapping the reed-shrouded shore.

“Another memory of a cat, Minou,” Seth says, with his low voice that sounds like a hug. “Why do you think that is?”

“She was the closest I had to a kid. I cared a lot about her. More than myself, especially at the end.”

Chengmei offers Minou a sad little smile. All I can do is keep staring at the blue streak in her hair.

“And why do you think this memory returned?” Seth leads gently. “Why this moment specifically, and not, say, one of the times when Cupcake jumped on you in bed in the morning, or greeted you after work?”

Minou frowns. “Because I adopted her with Adela. You’re trying to get me to talk about my wife.”

“I’m not trying to get you to talk about anything, Minou. I just want you to zoom out. You’re on a mountaintop looking down at the whole river of your memorystream. Why does your gaze fall on this particular bend in the river?”

She looks past him to the marsh reeds that ripple in the breeze. Yikes. She’s keeping it together better than I would, mid open-brain surgery in front of the group. I’d clam up. Flo has been on me about being closed off, but I haven’t remembered anything about my life that I want to share yet.

Stash, the guy with the translucent skin and purple-dyed mustache at her right, yelled at Seth yesterday about how this shrink talk was bullshit, and Seth had to remind him, unblinking, this is why you’re all here.

“Because it’s the last time we were happy,” Minou says with a tired sigh. “I don’t want to remember this shit with Adela. That’s why I deleted it.”

Seth has an unmoving smile like on one of the faces in the paintings in the manor. I haven’t said a word in group yet, and while Seth introduced me on my first day and said I’d need time to get settled in, he looks at me now like, anytime, buddy.

“It sounds like your mind is telling you what you need to remember in order to move on.” Seth lets this latest wisdom-bomb sit in the air for a while. A ways down the lawn, by the old fountain, some of the other residents putter around the archery range. Whiz, thunk. Arrows sink into the targets. Minou tucks a stray bit of hair behind her ear.

“Maybe,” she says.

Seth nods to the group. And that’s our cue. We are memories, and memories are we.

*   *   *

Moving Meditation is always after morning group therapy. Moving Meditation, aka “go for a walk.” I’m out of my seat and away from the others as fast as I can without looking like a complete dick. I pass two other Cohort sessions that just wrapped up, and a woman pops up off her blanket and tells me that when her dad cooked Sunday breakfast, the smell of browning butter filled the whole house. I smile at her and look down at her name, Siobhan, embroidered on her chest. The nametags are so you can put a face to the memories, Flo told me, and respect that other people are on the same journey as you.

Between the colored scrubs, the yellow bracelets, the Center-speak, and the nametags, I’m wondering not for the first time if I’ve stumbled into a cult. Or if I’m going to wake up tomorrow in a bathtub of ice, missing a kidney.

I’ve wandered off on my own the past two mornings, exploring the grounds. A few staff cottages sit by the small parking lot off one side of the house, empty except for a white van and a little black electric coupe that Seth drives in and out of here. A long dirt driveway leads to the road that cuts through the long, hedge-dotted yard and must meet up with the main road beyond the treeline. My first morning, he brought donuts from his favorite place in town to welcome me. During a tour that day, Flo said that the manor borders a nature reserve that stretches out for acres on three sides. Nothing to do here but rest and recover. The huge back lawn flows to the reed-spotted shore of the marsh, and way off in the distance rolls a clipped green field that looks like a golf course. Facing the water, off to the left, a low stone wall separates the main grounds from an old orchard. Flo said I’m allowed to explore beyond the rock wall—and I absolutely didn’t miss the allowpart—because I don’t have a yellow bracelet. But that I should bring a buddy for safety because the therapists aren’t supposed to leave the main grounds.

Screw the buddy system. The past two mornings I’ve needed a breather and wandered past the wall, alone. Today, Minou brushes my arm as she zips by, then half turns her head and jerks her chin. Come on.

I follow her along a path parallel to the two canoe racks at the shore, while in range of the manor with its terra-cotta roof and black iron garden gates. Over the lawn and past the dried-up fountain near the archery range, down a hill and into the old orchard with knobby green apples on the ground. Minou leans against one of the trees with its flaking gray bark and watches as Chengmei and Stash arrive behind me.

We stand in a loose circle around Minou, who looks like she’s cutting chem to smoke behind the school gym. I toe a bug-chomped apple with one slippered foot, waiting for a fresh round of Radical Remembrance, or whatever this is.

“Pop quiz,” Minou asks. “How’re you settling in?”

It takes me a second to realize she means me. I clear my throat.

“Alright.” I look at their eyes on me, the crossed arms, and the blob of the house on the hill behind us. “Un-unless this is a cult. Is this a cult?”

Minou barks a laugh. “Close. Mippers Anonymous.” She shoves off the tree with one foot. “That is, unwillingly anonymous, because none of us can remember exactly who the fuck we are.”

Mipper. Memory dipper. Something about it on a list of words not to use at work because they’re Not On Brand. I almost remember gossiping with the other editors and tossing the word around. Like, check out the hack job on this idiot mipper. Maybe the client tooled around with his live memory, or paid some back-alley hack—rolling the dice on an accidental brain-scramble—just to get a few blissed-out scenes dropped into his head. Seth said everyone is here at the Center because of their damaged memorystreams, and we don’t judge where that damage came from. And that we’re not mippers. We’re Memory-Damaged Individuals.

“Sounds about right,” I say.

“What’re you in here for? I shredded my brain pretty hard with some off-the-books edits, survey says.”

“Flo said I survived the attack on New Thebes.” I scrape one hand through my messy hair.

The way Minou’s eyes bug out of her head, I know I’ve stepped in it. I swear Stash and Chengmei shift away a step.

Stash whistles. “No shit? I’m surprised Seth doesn’t have you locked away. Like, to keep your cooties off the rest of us.”

I squint up into the sky, where two birds circle high overhead. I hoped I could find some company here. I guess I’ll just have to go at this alone.

Chengmei must see this all on my face with the way she smiles. Before I know it, she’s at my side squeezing my hand.

“The fact that you had enough code left at all to even be here is a miracle,” she says. Her hands are soft crinkled paper.

“Hell yeah,” Minou chirps. “I honor your memory.”

“Yeah,” Stash adds when Minou glares at him. “What they said.”

Cult. Definitely a cult.

I drop Chengmei’s hand and shift on my feet. “Thanks?”

“And how much do you remember from your life before here?” Minou continues. “Seth said you’re an editor, right? Makes sense, since you lived in New Thebes and all.”

“Not much. Everything’s pretty choppy. Flo said I was a good editor.”

“We were all good editors,” Stash quips. “Seth’s the Case Manager for all the former editors in the Center, meaning us three. Minou headed the Isfahan branch. Chengmei worked with kids doing—what’d you call it?”

“Early editing intervention at a pediatric hospital in Beijing,” she says. “Well, retired.”

“And Stash ran a back-alley editing farm in New Orleans,” Minou says sweetly.

“I prefer ‘small business.’” Stash waggles his mustache. “And, no judgment, remember?”

I might as well be the leaves behind Minou, bobbing on the wind and half-lost with all the bouncing around. “We were all good editors and we screwed up our memories? Shouldn’t we’ve known better?”

“Don’t even get me started on the stim habits of some of the surgeons at my hospital,” Chengmei says.

Fair. Do as I say, not as I do, and all.

“And what do you remember about Khadija’s history with the company?” Minou asks.

“She founded it ten-ish years back, right?”

Minou’s eyes gleam, giddy. She practically rubs her hands together.

“Meen, we shouldn’t…” Chengmei trails. “Some stuff he needs to recover on his own. You know what Flo says.”

“Oh, come on.” She flaps a hand. “I’m just giving him some context.”

Stash turns to me. “Here’s a Radical Remembrance for you. Minou was a history major—”

“Women’s Studies, History, and Sahusynics triple-doctorate, excuse you muchly.”

“—and apparently it’s her favorite thing in the world to school everyone on the story of the founding mothers,” Stash finishes.

“If by ‘school’ you mean I won’t let everyone forget how NIL/E was shaped by two of the greatest minds in human history, then class is absolutely in session.” Minou tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“We should be getting back, though.” Chengmei glances back at the manor, up the hill. “Flo will gong for morning rec soon.”

The gongs might be the most annoying thing here, as much as Flo—holding the mallet—told me I’d get used to it. Morning gong, breakfast. Ninety minutes of group therapy, half hour of Moving Meditation, gong for morning rec. Lunch, then gongs for individual therapy tracks. Then dinner and more gongs for evening programming, depending on the night. Two full days here and I’m already hearing gongs in my sleep. Going, going, gong.

“Sure,” Minou says. “I’ll just give him the quick tour—the real one—on our way back.” She nods, and before I know it, she links her arm in mine, eyeing me like I’m a cat in a shelter she’s here to save.

*   *   *

We walk in a loose cluster toward the manor as Minou covers the essay portion of the history pop quiz.

Khadija didn’t really found NIL/E, Minou says. Common mistake, even for company folks like me who just cash their paychecks—I shrug at her oops eyes to let her know I don’t care that she’s tossed me into this group—shere-launched it. It was Aset who created the whole field of Memory Mapping, known as Sahusynics, and gifted her code open-source to the world. We don’t know much about her other than her name, which was probably an online handle. Handles hid people. Handles could be masses or movements, handles could topple governments. But we know that Aset was a woman. It can’t be just a woman, boardrooms, and intelligence agencies, and news anchors moaned. Like, emphasis on the woman. But oh mama, that ship has sailed and we gave it a historically inaccurate Viking funeral, lighting it up with flaming arrows, and watching as the charred timbers sank beneath the waves.

Aset founded NIL/E Technologies about thirty years ago, which lets people download their consciousnesses and plug them into new bodies when their old ones wither away. Well, at first just the rich who didn’t shit themselves over the price tag, anyway. Immortality never came cheap. Just ask the ancient Egyptians, with their pyramids and temples full of treasures. Aset had a wide-on for that culture, with endless company brand-babble cribbed from ancient Egyptian beliefs.

Then Aset vanished, with a line in her last philosophies saying she was continuing her journey to the West. Cue the crackpot theories that she was actually an emissary of an advanced alien race spreading technology throughout the galaxy, or that she died and the company covered it up, or that she retired to a quiet life in the woods because she had no desire to be a megalomanic piece of shit tech CEO like all the others. Which was maybe the most unbelievable of the theories. Ten years later Khadija Banks became the CEO of NIL/E, taking the company from boutique to behemoth by offering memory editing. New product lines, and price drops and payment plans to bring immortality to the plebs. What Aset had started Khadija finished, like rites passed down from master to initiate.

Some people even whispered that Khadija was Aset incarnated, if you believe in that stuff. Especially with the way Khadija had seen the crumbling empires of the exhausted, dying world and had laughed and said, You know what? I’m going to burn all this shit to the ground and start all over. I’ll remake and re-flower this entire codedamned world and you’ll all be my kiddos. And mosaics of my countless faces will adorn walls in every NIL/E building in every corner of this world.

As bored as Stash looks, it is pretty cool to hear this part of Khadija’s story. Like, it’s nice to know that even if I wasn’t a doctor or whatever, I was working for someone who was trying to improve the world. That’s something.

We hit the edge of the manicured lawn, where a resident dashes over to us, the name Hotaru on her sweatshirt. I knock into Minou, startled by the manic joy in Hotaru’s eyes.

“I’m a gymnast,” Hotaru blurts. She doesn’t wait for us to say anything, just bangs out a half-cartwheel that sees her flopping onto the grass. She frowns up at us, huffing. “I mean, I used to be better.”

“We honor your memory,” Minou and the others say at once.

Once we’re closer to the manor, Stash and Chengmei split for rec time. We pass Flo, who’s chatting with two therapists, and she waves at us with a smile. “Giving him the residents’ side of the tour,” Minou sings out. Flo flashes a thumbs-up. Minou glances behind us—there always seems to be a therapist within earshot on the main grounds—and the coast must be clear with how she whispers to me, “Here’s the real deal.”

“Stay away from Octavio,” she says. “Sweet guy who loves his Radical Remembrance, but maybe he should think more about Radical Teeth-Brushing. Inyene likes to talk about all the sex she remembers having, and gets annoyed when it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Flo is literally the best. She’s like Mom for both the residents and therapists. Seth is—fine. As much as his touchy-feeling talk can get annoying. He’s the only one who leaves after dinner, since the other therapists live in cottages on the grounds. Rumor is half of them are boning each other, and good for them. Nights here are beyond boring when you can only meditate for so long. They relax the ‘stay in your room after lights-out’ rule a bit when Seth is gone. Last week, they let the residents have a dance party in the music room, even forgot two bottles of wine there. They’re cool so long as you’re not outwardly asshole-y to them, which Stash found out the hard way when one therapist subbed out his rec time for Manual Mindfulness. Otherwise known as laundry duty. Still, they’re staff and not your friends, meaning don’t say anything within earshot of them that you don’t want Seth bringing up in your next one-on-one.

“Coffee is always in two decanters in the dining room. They switch over to decaf in the afternoon, so if you’re a caffeine fiend, be sure to fill an extra mug of the leaded stuff at lunch and leave it in your room. The food mostly sucks. Seth is big on we must nourish the body if we are to nourish the mind and loves to feed everyone wilted vegetables that look like they were yanked up from the marsh. Old resident lore says one of the therapists smuggles in snacks as a side-hustle, but I’ve been fishing for weeks and I still can’t figure out who.

“Honestly, it’s as good as you can make it. And based on what some of us got into back home…” Minou shrugs. “Maybe better than we deserve.”

She leaves me by the coffee decanters. Fresh coffee scalds my hand, even through the mug. I look down at my face warping on the surface of the dark liquid, wondering if I really knew what the hell I was getting myself into before I came here. If I knew that I’d be pummeled with everyone else’s memories and trauma every day.

FOUR

WATERCOLOR

My favorite spot for After-Lunch Free Exploration is the greenhouse attached to the resident kitchen. The quiet, glass-walled room opens to the herb garden and looks out over the lawn and the old fountain. The air smells like warm dirt, in a good way. Plants in cracked clay pots line shelves along the walls, with ivy spilling onto the brick floors and flower buds reaching to the sky. I’m trying not to stare at Nduta, the other resident in here, who’s sitting at a planting table with a pad of paper, a cup of water, and a watercolor palette like I am, with a yellow bracelet on her wrist. Instead of painting the vase of roses on the table—my picture’s an oozy blob of pink and green, but I’m trying—she’s licking one fingertip, dabbing it in the circles of paint on her palette, and smearing it on her lips. Until J, who’s watering the plants, rushes over like Nduta is a baby stumbling on chunky thighs toward an open oven.

Not everyone came here in as good a shape as you, Flo told me when I woke up. I flick my eyes away from Exhibit A and keep painting.

“I knew I’d find you here!”

I spin in my seat to see Flo in the greenhouse doorway, hands on her hips, her puffy blonde hair haloing her head. She pushes up her glasses and beams at me like I’m her favorite student. She waggles both hands for me to follow and waits until we’re breezing through the hallway, past therapists and residents, to talk just loud enough for me to hear.

“Now, don’t get your hopes up,” she says, in a bright way that’s already ballooning said hopes. “We’ve been able to debug one memory snapshot. Not a big one. Still, this could be a really good sign for your treatment.”

“Good is… good?”

“Very good.”

I keep quiet as this flip-flops in my head. Past the dining room and sunroom, up one of the two narrow staircases on either end of the first floor. She fiddles with the red and green wrapper of a strawberry candy from her cardigan and pops the sweet into her mouth.

“And debug? What does that mean?” I frown as my brain cells crawl like ants after her fake strawberry-candy fumes.

“I know it’s frustrating,” she says. “All I can tell you is that while you’re working on recovering your memories organically—the therapies, that is—we’re doing what we can, too. We’ve got the best editors in here trying to scrub the corruption from a save-file of your code. And we will.”

A huge window up ahead beams gold squares onto the honey floors. We stop at the central staircase that separates the second floor into two resident wings. The wooden banister posts are carved into swan heads that look like they’re following more of Flo’s words than I am.

“Save-file?”

“A copy of your memorystream is uploaded to NIL/E servers every twelve hours,” she says. “You remember that, right? A company safety measure to rez clients in case of—godforbid—incapacitation, or accidental death, when their nodes aren’t retrievable. Well, no need to worry about that.”

My head’s still running on spin cycle as I follow her up the stairs to an archway of double doors. I’ve never been to the manor’s third floor before, just the public spaces on the first floor and resident hallway on the second. The third floor must’ve been a massive attic when this was a private house.

Flo opens the double doors, blasting me in the face with sunlight and the smell of old books.

I follow her through, stepping onto a huge, tasseled carpet, turning open-mouthed to drink in the room. The wall of bookshelves opposite the rock wall inset with a fireplace, with one shelf stocked with Reeders in a row like unlit candles. The wall of windows opposite the door, looking out onto the marshlands. A huge carved wooden desk sits in front of the window, stacked with computer screens that trail wires down to the floor and into a big golden slab that looks too much like a coffin with blippy lights. A little silver bar cart stocked with tumblers, decanters of booze, and glass vials of what must be fancy gold whiskey waits by the desk. I wonder if they all knock back cocktails at the end of the day. I sure as hell could use a pull.

“That him?” a round-faced therapist with a red beard behind the desk asks. Three other therapists at folding metal workstations look up.

“The one and only,” Flo says.

“I thought he’d be taller.”

“Oh, you’re always bad.” Flo swats the air. “He’ll be coding you under the table in no time.” Then looking back at me, wearing her auntie smile. “Don’t mind Sig. He thinks he’s Seth’s favorite editor and doesn’t want to share the spotlight.”

I spin in a tight circle on the carpet and almost trip over my own feet. “What the hell is this place?”

“The Ankh Room.” Sig gets up from the desk and flicks open his Reeder screen. He bobs his chin at the gold coffin. “And that’s the Ankh. Well, Neb-Ankh if you wanna get all technical like Seth. But not everyone’s up on their ancient Egyptian.”

“This is our editing room,” Flo translates. “Downstairs you work on your minds and bodies. Up here we work on your code.”

“And we’ve got this lovely bit ready for you to gander at.” Sig taps at his Reeder until a picture crackles into the air, suspended on three thin beams of light from the Ankh. “Ta-da.” He waggles his fingers.

The semi-transparent image looks like stacks of kids’ blocks, all warped like I’m looking at it through water. Only when I squint do I realize it’s a city street, with a smudge of green on the sidewalk that’s maybe a person? Or a blob from my watercolor?

“That’s it?” I ask.

Sig frowns, with Flo rocking a little on her toes like I’m opening a birthday gift she just gave me.

“Yeah, not much to look at,” he agrees. He tugs at one end of his thick red beard. “It’s about what you feel.”

His eyes bounce from me to the Ankh. Oh, wait. They want me to get in that thing? I’ll take some singing crystal bowls, please. Or talking about cats with Seth and Minou. Or, or…

“Hon, you don’t have to be afraid,” Flo says. “This is a piece of you, pulled right from your memory. It’s like going home.”

Flo calls the picture a Memory Excerpt, and with her kindergarten-teacher emphasis on the words, I can see the capital letters. It looks like a snapshot, but that’s just the visual trigger, the tip of the iceberg. I have to go into the Ankh, where they’ll drop the salvaged code into my memorystream, and I’ll live it again for myself.

The therapists draw the curtains, plunging the room into darkness except for the glow of screens and the sharp blue lines on the Ankh. The darkness cranks my heartbeat way up, and my eyes flick to the door. Sig looks heavy and slow, and Flo like the fastest she moves is a power walk with her neighbors. I could probably book it outta here and scramble to the road before they even hit the stairs.

Flo hands me one of the glass vials of gold liquid from the bar cart. “Sedative. It’ll help with the transition.”

Her smiling eyes hit me while I stare at the glass vial. Easy, Fox, you came here for a reason. For your memories. For Gabe. And if this is the only way, then bottoms up. The stuff tastes like liquid sunshine.

“Oh, I’m not supposed to do this, but…” Flo gushes at my side before squeezing me in a hug that’s over before I know what it is.

Her words—even the quick hug—help. And, hell yeah, the sedative, too. I’m warm all over, drizzled with honey. I step into the coffin and she eases me back with warm hands on my shoulders. The sides of the Ankh press in close, but already my head is telling me not to mind so much. Already, my bones blur.

“It’ll feel like you’re dreaming.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Sweet dreams, Fox.”

A gold mask snaps down over my face from the wall of the Ankh. A picture sparks to life across the mask, of reeds by a shore swaying in the breeze.

FIVE

THE OLD KINGDOM

As soon as Fox rounded the street corner to find Gabe waiting in front of the double doors to the marriage therapist’s office, the whole world crunched down to the collared shirt under his leather jacket. Who was he trying to fool? Mint-green cotton screamed against the white faux-marble-fronted building that was glazed with cold winter rain. Wrinkle-free and with a stiff collar that must’ve been chafing his neck when all he ever wore was stretchy gym gear. From frowning down at his phone because Fox was ten minutes early instead of fifteen—translation:He’slate—Gabe glanced up. His eyes brightened, and his teeth poked out from between his full lips with his smile. Then, an exaggerated eye-roll-meets-head-loll of finally.

But all Fox could see was the minty shirt, like Gabe was trying to win over the therapist with some Respectable Husband drag. When he’d announced after last week’s session, I just can’t win with that guy. He doesn’t like me.

“There he is,” Gabe said.

“I decided not to bail after all,” Fox said.

Imagine if he actually had bailed, after the therapy sessions were his idea. After Yvonne at work gushed about how Darius saved her marriage, and Fox and Gabe had to give him a whirl. When sitting in a room and talking about feelings was, for Gabe, the kind of concrete-cell hellscape cops uploaded suspects into for a little enhanced interrogation.

Fox stopped by Gabe at his post across from the glass double doors. Light from the pink sign of two interlocking rings glinted off the gold loop in Gabe’s nose. Fox slipped a finger between the buttons of Gabe’s shirt and tugged him closer for a quick kiss that was little more than their lips bouncing off each other. Fox lingered, his nose hovering over Gabe’s glowing skin and neat stubble.

“Plum scrub?” Fox asked. Tish, the head bodyfication tech at Gabe’s work, always surprised him with some free treat when he re-uploaded into his body after a client training session. Salt scrub. Hand mask. Gabe was her favorite personal trainer. Gabe was everyone’s favorite person. Except Darius’s, but Gabe would win him over unless Fox rope-swung in to keep things neutral.

“Apricot,” Gabe said.

“Tish spoils you.”

“She does.”

“The shirt’s nice,” Fox said, lips still tingly with that kiss. And the shirt was nice with the way it brought out the gold in Gabe’s eyes. Fox was being an asshole with his whole how dare you look nice thing. Probably. A shirt was a shirt, not a weapon, which he could see when he considered things from Gabe’s point of view, which the marriage therapist who said not to call him a marriage therapist had said.

“Thanks,” Gabe said. “I have a hot date.” He bobbed his chin at Fox, smirking. “Long commute?”

And here it was, the one-two jab of shirt, happy hello, and the guilt uppercut finisher, so that Fox knew that Gabe had decided he was late. Even though they both worked a ten-minute walk away from this slab of fake marble, in the flagship building of NIL/E Technologies.

“I stopped to rescue a squad of orphans from a burning building,” Fox said. “Lost track of time. What with the smoke.” Fox tried to squish his annoyance, which mostly worked.

“Orphans!” Gabe’s wide-eyed smile swooped his dark eyebrows toward his freshly trimmed hairline. “Get him the key to the fuckin’ city.”

“Ready to head inside?”

“You bet.”