Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“Oh,” Stacia said. “You know. The memory thing.”

“Pretend I don’t know,” Mary said. She sort of knew. She’d read about this on the kina-cast a while back. It was the thing where your ex gave you a memory wisp, right? A download?

“The important thing is, he doesn’t give you all of his memories of the relationship,” said Stacia. “Just the happy ones. The ones from the first two or three months, or maybe four or five if the relationship went on longer. Especially, no memories from the tail end, leading up to the breakup. Not even stuff that seemed happy at the time, because in retrospect it will all seem terrible.”

“Yeah,” Mary said. “But I already remember our relationship, more than I honestly want to. Why would I want his memories of that stuff? I might as well just jam hot needles into my tear ducts.”

“It’s not for you, dumbass.” Stacia slapped Mary’s arm. “It’s for whoever you date next. Your new boyfriend can get implanted with all of Roger’s memories of getting to know you. That way, the new guy can know how you like to be touched in bed, and what your favorite flavor of mycosnuff is. He’ll already know all the awkward details, but it won’t feel like too much too soon, because he’ll have memories of learning it all over a period of months. And the best part is, if he gets Roger’s memories and decides he doesn’t want to date you after all, he can get them removed, as long as it’s within a few days. After seventy-two hours, Roger’s memories become integrated with his own, and then they’re permanent.”

“You’ve thought a lot about this,” Mary said.

“Well, yeah,” Stacia said. “In the unlikely event I date someone for more than a few months ever again, I want him to do a memory download for sure. Think about it: You wouldn’t get a new kina without transferring over your address book and settings and stuff, right?”

“I doubt Roger would want to do that,” Mary said. “I don’t even know if he has any good memories of our time together.”

“That’s why he has to do it now,” Stacia said. “He still has the happy memories, buried somewhere. But every day that passes since the breakup, the happy stuff gets buried deeper and deeper as he convinces himself you never had anything. A week from now, those good times you shared will be beyond the ability of science to retrieve.”

Mary still wasn’t sure, but Stacia gave her the hard sell: “He owes you. All of that time you invested in him, it’s like you put equity into a home. And now that he’s evicted you, he owes it to you to cash out your equity, so you can put it into a new place. That’s all this is.” When she put it like that, the whole thing made sense.

Seeing Roger’s face for the first time since the breakup caused Mary’s brain to make a correction in real-time—fast, but not fast enough to be painless. The instinctive “partner-bond” signal fired in her brain, causing waves of pleasure and comfort. Like a hot bath on a frozen day. And then she had to pull back, as if the hot bath had turned out to be boiling instead. She had to look at Roger’s perfect hazel eyes and breathe in his pine-forest scent… and remember that this was over.

Mary’s whole life was neurochemistry, so she knew that a lot of this sensation was just the chemical battery in her brain, sparking erroneously based on out-of-date information.

They met for lunch, the day after Mary’s conversation with Stacia. Mary had the day off from the makery, and Roger could take a long lunch break at his strategic consulting firm, where he was helping to re-position the troubled rejuvenation sector. (Roger had heard every joke about the rejuvenation industry getting old, a dozen times.) They were eating at the same restaurant where Roger had told her that he needed space: a hand-pulled noodle place where a man stood in the front window pulling noodles, 24/7. Mary had loved this restaurant, which had red lanterns, grease-stained tablecloths, and chewy noodles, but now it was tainted forever.

“I don’t know, Mare,” Roger said, after she explained what she wanted him to do. “I mean, those are private memories. You’re talking about a piece of my identity.

“Even if they could pull out just the memories pertaining to our courtship—which I don’t believe for a second they can, that’s awfully granular—those are still my memories, they’re personal.”

“Oh, come on, Roger,” Mary said. “Don’t be a jerk. I’m not asking for your life story. Just a few months of specific memories, which won’t have any of the context. So they won’t mean the same thing to anyone else that they mean to you. If they do mean anything to you.”

She was starting to sob again—weakling—so she reached for the longest and slimiest noodle in her bowl and slurped it loudly to mask the sound. She gestured for the waiter and demanded a scallion pancake.

“You can’t say that.” Roger’s eyes widened in a way that would have melted her brain when they were together. “You can’t say they mean nothing to me. They mean a lot to me. Those memories are precious to me. Of course they are.”

“I guess not,” Mary said. She had avoided recriminations when he had jilted her. She had taken the bad news with composure, but now this felt like a second jilting. “Obviously, none of this ever meant anything to you. None of it ever mattered at all. Right?”

Mary never knew what Roger had seen in her in the first place, any more than she understood why he had broken up with her, after six years that had seemed happy to her. The whole thing was a mystery, beginning and end.

“Did Stacia put you up to this?” Roger said. “I swear, you two were always like this hive mind. The whole time we were together, I felt like I was dating both of you.”

“Leave Stacia out of this,” Mary said. “This is about you and me.” She stabbed her onion pancake with a single chopstick, skewering and gesturing. “Those memories that you don’t want to share, I bet they’re just memories of you figuring out how to seduce me, so you could use me and get your fill and then throw me aside. You probably treated it just like one of your strategy briefs.”

Roger didn’t know how to respond to that. For a moment, he just held up both hands, like he was about to gesture. Then he let them drop again.

“You want to take my memories,” Roger said. “And give them to some other man. My personal memories, of you. And you don’t see how that’s messed up?”

“I see that you threw me aside, and now you don’t want to give me the one thing that will let me have closure,” Mary said. “You’re probably already dating someone else. Aren’t you?” Roger’s squirming was confirmation enough.

Guilt won. Roger went to the clinic, which was a glorified kiosk just outside the mall that smelled of ozone, and Mary watched the whole time as the neural sensors danced around the three-dimensional map of Roger’s mind, plucking out the specific bits of his past that related to the two of them getting together. She tried to imagine what the machine was getting. Their first meeting at the Bankrupt Daisies concert, their first proper date when it rained and Roger held his jacket over her head, that time they bonded over both hating Jane Austen, the whole weekend they spent naked, his dad’s funeral. It was all becoming a blur to her, but those months would be preserved. Pristine.

At the end, Roger looked exhausted, under the weather. “I have to go lie down,” he said. He handed her a sparkly memory wisp, a silver feather floating in a plexiglas cube. She thanked him several times and even kissed his cheek. The cube fit in her purse, next to her mycosnuff and breathspray. She imagined implanting those memories into hundreds of men, thousands even, so they could all remember falling in love with her. And then that thought scared her with its brazenness, so she banished it. She thanked Roger again, and he said it was nothing.