I can see myself. Pieces of me, refracted in the liquid bend of liquor in glasses; pieces of me, suspended in time. I can’t put myself back together; can’t assemble a whole face out of the facets. There, my eyes, and all I’ve seen. Doubled, reversed in another glass, reduced to a twisted squint. Facing them, my mouth, and all the stupid things I’ve said. A cacophony of images, loud in their silence.
Loud in their emptiness.
The silence has gone on too long. The seller at the bar clears her throat. “So, are you interested, or not?”
“How do I know these are my native memories?”
“The engrams are encoded on the crystals, and match your data rig’s serial number.”
My fingers reach for the data rig slot at the back of my head. It’s where I can swap out chips and crystals, embedded directly into the brainstem. Most days, I don’t sense it as anything other than a stiffness in my neck. Today, it seems to burn.
I’ve sold a lot of myself over the years. People will pay a lot for a decent, unexceptional childhood to patch over their own wretched lives. A middle child, unbullied, average in grades, liked by some, ignored by most? That’s what my paperwork says I sold. An unexceptional first marriage. A son who, by all accounts, seems to have grown up hating me, for whatever reason. He’s not in touch. I don’t remember him, from first word to first footsteps to first day of school, to screaming fights and slammed doors.
I don’t remember any of it. My past is a hollow, echoing wasteland. The more I’ve sold, the emptier I’ve become, till all I am, all I have left, is my job.
My paperwork says my second wife left me because she didn’t know who I was anymore. I apparently sold the pain of that loss to a collector, a connoisseur of modern anguish. The paperwork the seller has handed me says that he offered it to his guests at parties as ‘the crush of banal existentialism.’
Apparently, it was a palate cleanser.
Do I want it all back? Who will I be, if I take all the pieces of myself back into me?
“It took me quite a while to track all the pieces down,” the seller says, clearly understanding my hesitation. “The bottom line is expensive, but it’s all of you.” She tilts her head to the side, long hair falling across her face. “Of course, you could go for a different package. Be someone else. I have a full line of options.”
“Synthetic memories?” I feel my lips curl. Some part of me despises that notion. Maybe it’s even a real piece of me.
“I have organic memories as well. A rough childhood, to give you something to elevate yourself over, to triumph in spite of. A tragic backstory always adds interest.” Is that sarcasm? Hard to say. “Then a successful career, a happy marriage . . . it can all be yours.” She brings up a set of numbers on her pad and lets me see the total. “I mean, it won’t be a matched set. They’ll all have come from different people. But you’ll . . . stitch it together. You’ll make it make sense. People always do. We’re good at that.”
It’s tempting. “No,” I finally reply softly. “Just me. All of me.”
“It’s your funeral.” She shrugs, and accepts my credit chit, waving it over her payment strip and handing it back. Then she sets a case in front of me and unlocks it, revealing over a dozen memory crystals.
My reflection bounces back from them, caught and refracted a dozen times over. My hands shake as I reach for the first.
Pieces of me. I’m coming home to myself.
About the author:
Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-placing poetry collections, Bounded by Eternity and From Voyages Unreturning, see www.deborahldavitt.com.
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