SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

But for weeks at a time Hayes saw Miell only on the vid or in person briefly at night after he was asleep. His eyes would open a slit and she’d appear blurry, a wreck. And worse, there were dozens of memories Hayes had of his mother seemingly passed out, or rolling on the floor clawing at her scalp, or pleading with someone to get her a fix.

I am not addicted to any drug, she’d said, like a politician denying a specific thing truthfully while lying by omitting the larger truth. So, if not a drug…what?

I ran the vid back to one of those pleading scenes. Hayes sat on the couch playing a game. Miell told him to mute it while she argued with some man. I backed it up a little more.

Maybe I could…

I minimized the vid controls on the comppad and searched the menu for editing software. This was one of my obsessions back in the day. The one I found had way more bells and whistles on it than I ever had, but I knew enough to know what to ignore.

I soon had the scene downloaded to the pad. I copied the section I wanted to work with and brought up the snippet in the editing software. Isolating the audio, I ran it back several times.

“D…dal…Bi..l be…s[unintelligible]…You got…[unintelligible]…can’t ren…[unintelligible]…No…—ts!”

This section finished with a barrage of enraged words from Miell that were also unintelligible, but the meaning was clear.

It wasn’t much to go on.

I worked with it: dulling the ambient noise, pulling up the dominant frequency of Miell’s voice, tweaking the bass and treble so the vowels would come in more clearly, running it over and over. Sometimes the results were worse. Finally some of the words came in more clearly.

“…deal’s a deal. Bi-n[- something ]-l beats. You got me hooked…[unintelligible]can’t renege. Didn’t know…[unintelligible]…No…[unintelligible]…fucking implants!” And then the cursing.

Bi-n[something]-l…beats. It tugged at my memory.

What else could she be addicted to if not a drug?

I used to be addicted to digital technology; that’s why I was so wary of it to this day.

Bin—-l beats.

Binaural beats. Of course.

Audio recordings geared specifically for human ears, the human brain. One sound thread for each ear, running into and mixing in the brain. They’d been around forever and—like snake oil—people would periodically claim that they were digital drugs, safe for relaxation, stimulation and highs. Just like pharmaceuticals without criminality or side effects. I never knew them to gain any credibility and I hadn’t heard or thought of them in years.

I did an Internet search and was, once again, blown away by what I had missed. Binaurals were big business. Huge.

I walked into Miell’s bedroom. There in the bedside table were the headphones I’d seen Hayes listening to when she wasn’t at home. They were hardwired into a dedicated audio device. Odd , I thought, I never saw her wearing them in any of Hayes’ memories. But then, I couldn’t watch every minute of his life.

I put them on and turned up the volume.

“Hayes, are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Mom told me to check your chip yesterday. I almost forgot again.”

He rolled over and looked at me sleepily.

Sure enough, it blinked red. I popped the chip out, put it on the table and turned back to him. I stroked his soft cheek, passively bemoaning the day in the future when coarse whiskers would sprout from them.

“I want you to come to my house for a visit.”

“Your house?”

“Uh-huh. We’ll wait till school’s out and go then.”

“Does Mom know?”

“Um, no. I just thought of it. Don’t mention it yet. Let me work out the details first, okay?”

“Sure. How will we get there? How far is it?”

“Let’s talk tomorrow. Another week of school?”

He nodded.

“Okay, I’ll need to tell the school camp that you won’t be there at first. Do you mind missing it?”

He shrugged and shook his head.

“We’ll have an adventure.”

He didn’t react much. This was a boy who waited to see. “You have cousins.”

“I do?”

I nodded. “Some older, some younger.”

“I’ll meet them?”

I nodded again thinking of the birthday party I was going to give him. “Remember I told you about my animals.”

“Oh yeah.” He thought for a minute. “A dog?”

“Yep. A big, old, stinky golden retriever. And cats. And ducks.”

“I can see them all?”

“Of course. Guess what my dog’s name is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Red.”

He gasped. “Red’s my fav—”

We broke into a fit of giggles. When it faded, he said, “Mom will think this is okay?”

“I’m hoping she’ll come too.”

This was obviously too far-fetched for him to believe, but he grinned when he said, “Not really.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll try to convince her.”

I patted him again and got up to leave.

“Gama, you forgot to put in the new chip.”

The next day, I set to work researching the coding behind ReMemory. Once a techie, always a techie. I went searching for forums I hadn’t been near in years. There they were with the same clunky, old-fashioned formats and an astounding number of the same names; old Internet friends who were more than happy to help me hack into the program.

I ran a bunch of old memory chips through the vid, copying and pasting clips onto the comppad, constructing the most boring, generic memories I could find from Hayes’ life until I had almost enough for a full chip. I slipped an empty chip into the vid, dated it next in sequence before the one Hayes was currently wearing and filled it with the fabricated comppad memories.

By the time his school was out for a few weeks of summer, we were packed and ready to go. Hayes had asked no more questions about how much his mother knew or whether she was coming, but I owed him the truth.

“I haven’t told your mom that we’re going, Hayes,” I said that morning.

“You said you would.”

“I know, but that could backfire.”

“What do you mean?”

“She might fly home, hire another nanny, make me leave without you and life would go on as it was before I got here. I don’t want to take that risk. I hope you don’t either.”

He sat at the kitchen bar eating his cereal. He took several more bites before answering. I sweated out the long pause. “I want to go with you. But, are you kidnapping me?”

“Good question. Kind of. I guess. But your mom cares about both of us. I believe she finally let me into your lives because she knows she needs help and didn’t know how to get it any other way. I hope she’ll join us there, but she might just come and bring you right back here. I can’t stop her if that’s what she wants.”

He nodded, still chewing. “Okay. I want her to be like she was before she got the mic-implants.”

I stopped cleaning up the counter and turned to him. “The what?”

He looked guilty.

I walked over to him, pressed on his implant and took out his memory chip, putting it down on the counter. “It’s okay. I need to know.”

“She got implants. They’re like microphones in your ears so you don’t have to wear headphones.”

I breathed. “And since she got them…?”

He shrugged. “She’s been really weird.”

It took me a while, but I finally said, “I want her to be like she used to be too, buddy. So, we have to do one more thing to make this work. We’re going to record a fake memory on one of your chips. It’s called ‘acting.'”

He grinned.