Children of the New World: Stories (4 page)

What the populace wanted, what they still want, what they’ll always want, is pulp cybernetics. Perhaps not so cheap as the corner-store memories China’s producing—$8.99 porn thrills so poorly constructed you can see the patches of light where the software burns through the girls’ skin—but give them palm trees, a restaurant with an attractive server, coral reefs, and sand dollars for the kids, and you have a package that retails for $79.99.

*   *   *

IT WAS SHORTLY
after
Circuitry
did the article on us that Quimbly began experimenting with bad memories. It was a natural progression for him. He specialized in emotional recollections: childhoods, marriages, and adolescence. He’d always cringed from anything Hallmarky—the happy marriages and quintessential childhoods—“puppies and kittens” as he called them. His first generation of memories all contained some element of sadness within them: grandchildren for the childless elderly and losses of virginity to lonely men who’d never known love. But there was something truly sinister to Quimbly’s second batch. He sold heroin addictions to artists wanting darker aesthetics, affairs to couples who’d never cheated on one another, gunfights to rappers, and suicide attempts to Goth kids.

It was to get away from the dark energies Quimbly was manufacturing that I ended up meeting Cynthia. She was sitting in the coffee shop, across from my office, where I’d go to get coffee, clear my head, and work on constructing happier memories. There was no computer or phone in front of her, only an open journal that she leaned over in concentration. I was fascinated. I hadn’t seen anyone using a pen since college, and even then it was mostly older professors who’d used them. She was in her thirties, with long brown hair and flushed cheeks, and every now and again she rested the pen against her bottom lip as she tapped her sandaled foot against the table. If her pen hadn’t run dry, she probably never would have seen me.

“Hey,” she said.

“Me?” I asked stupidly; there was no one else around.

“Yeah, you. Do you have a pen?” She held hers in the air. “This one’s done for.”

“Sorry,” I said and looked back at my tablet, wishing I wasn’t such an idiot around women. Say something, I told myself, and so I looked back up and said, “Hey.” She raised her eyes. “I’ll go ask if the barista has one.”

It turned out he didn’t. I walked back to her table. “Sorry,” I said, “no luck.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.” She closed her journal.

“What are you writing?”

“Memories,” she said, and pointed her pen at my tablet. “What about you?”

“Pretty much the same. It’s my work; I make memories. Maybe you’ve heard of us? Quimbly, Barrett, and Woods?” She shook her head. “We’re in a lot of blogs right now.”

“I don’t read blogs,” she said. “I try to stay disconnected.”

“You’ve heard of beamed memories, though, right?” She shook her head again. “Well, I’m Adam,” I said, and extended my hand.

“Cynthia,” she said.

“I could show you what I do, if you’d like. Our workshop’s just across the street. I’m sure there’s a pen there.”

She put her journal in her bag. “Sure,” she said. “Show me your memories.”

*   *   *

CYNTHIA KEPT ME
out of the office that weekend. It’d been a long time since I’d been with anyone, and never with someone like Cynthia. When we lay in bed together, I could feel the loneliness of my previous life, filled with computer programming and take-out containers, giving way to the happiness of a future together. In short, I was falling in love.

I called in sick Monday and stayed in bed with her, afraid that if I left, she’d disappear. It was the first time in months that I didn’t work on constructing memories. Instead, I let my mind fill with details of her: what her lips felt like, the timbre of her voice when she said my name, the way morning spread across the bedroom.

When I finally returned to work on Tuesday and told the guys, I got ribbed by Quimbly. “So that’s what happens when you get laid? You stop showing up?” I shrugged and blushed. “Thought you’d both left me,” he said. “Barrett’s lost in the Bible.”

Barrett was sitting by his computer with his head down, the golden-rimmed pages of a King James on his desk. He’d found his niche with religious experiences. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Shhh…,” he said darkly, and didn’t look up.

“He’s writing Sunday sermons now,” Quimbly said. “Turns out folks are just as happy thinking they’ve been to church than actually going. Barrett, put that fucking Bible down, we’ve got something serious to talk about.” Barrett raised a bloodshot glare from the book before marking the page and rising.

We’d gotten our first complaint. A tech-savvy grad student had intentionally gone seeking the edge. He’d tried to remember driving to the border of the Mexican town we’d created for spring break and had run into the white light. His blog posts were already circulating the Internet.

“We haven’t been designing tight enough memories,” Quimbly said.

“The kid went searching,” I said defensively; it’d been my memory. “We can’t control where our users go.”

“Maybe not, but we can test each other’s memories,” Quimbly said. “From now on, before we release anything for sale, you go into Barrett’s memories, he goes into yours, and both of you go into mine. You test out the edges. Search every alleyway, open every door, drive as far as you can. You find the edge of a memory, you fix it. Go ahead and test at home if you want, just make sure you log every beam.”

“And what are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m the control group,” Quimbly said. He promised to watch over us and hold our memories straight. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll keep your brains from getting fried.”

*   *   *

THE PROBLEM WITH
testing memories was that after enough beams, it became impossible to recognize the difference between authentic memories and beamed ones. Had I really fought in Afghanistan? Cynthia was lying next to me in bed, reading a book. It was one of her things—she read actual books. Where she found them, I have no idea. But there she’d be, pillows propped behind her head, reading a novel word by word, page after page, taking endless hours when she could’ve had the thing memorized in minutes.

“Did I ever fight in Afghanistan?” I asked.

“You weren’t born yet,” she said dryly.

“How about Bermuda?”

She lowered her book onto her knees and shook her head. “The last place you actually went was your parents’ house for Thanksgiving.”

It was February. I tried to remember back to November, the dinner with my parents, but it seemed less real than my memories of the tropics. “Are you sure?” I asked.

She raised her book. “Yeah, I’m positive. You’ve got to stop beaming.”

Cynthia was vegan and almost entirely anti-tech. She was devoted to causes like buying back land for Native Americans and safeguarding water rights for third world countries. Though I supported her causes, I resented that she never praised my work. “You know that indigenous tribes are buying our memories, right?”

She let out a heavy sigh. “I’m not trying to put down your work,” she said. “But you’re spending more time trying to figure out memories you never had than making real memories with me. You’re getting addicted.”

This wasn’t entirely true. In those first months together, I’d go to the Crow’s Nest and work on memories during the day, then take nights off with her. A bistro had opened near my place, and we’d go there on the weekends for breakfast. Nights we’d order in Chinese, lie in bed, and make love. But Cynthia was right. There were many times when she’d catch me staring out the window, trying to find the edge of Quimbly’s latest memory.

At work, Quimbly, Barrett, and I focused on making our memories last longer. The key was to package memories together. A vacation to Europe couldn’t simply be the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre; it needed to involve the airplane ride, the week at work before, the mundane details that helped make the memories stick.

“All good memories have boredom buried in them,” Quimbly told us one night.

“You should write children’s books,” I said.

Barrett was unusually quiet. He’d grown more silent ever since he began designing past-life memories, and we mistook his silence for Zen satori rather than the madness that was slowly taking his mind.

“Look, if we make perfect memories, we’re not going to have customers left,” Quimbly said and leaned over the coffee table. “The key to our success is to give people ninety-nine percent perfect experiences. Make them
almost
happy, and they’ll keep buying. Trust me on this.” Then he gave us the next batch of memories to test.

*   *   *

CYNTHIA HATED QUIMBLY
from the first time they met. I’d invited Quimbly for dinner in hopes that they’d get along, but by the time we sat down to eat, it was a mess. Cynthia was working on a clean-water project for children in Mali and, in typical Quimbly fashion, he started an argument. “Look, I get you, it’s good to give them water, but let’s be honest, water’s not going to save them. They’re going to die from disease, civil war, malnutrition. Give them memory sticks and at least they’ll have happy memories before they die.”

“That’s really sick,” Cynthia said.

“You’re telling me if you could give them a happy childhood, you’d deny them?”

“It’s not a happy childhood; it’s forgetting their actual past.”

“I think you
want
them to suffer,” Quimbly said. “Somehow their pain makes things real for you.”

I tried to soothe the tension, suggested we do both, send them water
and
memories. Getting the kids water made sense, I said, it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t see any harm in giving kids good memories as well.

“Fuck that,” Cynthia said. “What you’re talking about is making a bunch of beam-heads who won’t ever work for social change.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “We’re designing parents for inner-city kids with horrible upbringings; we’ve donated memories to the poor.”

“That’s not social change,” Cynthia said and got up from the table, leaving her dinner unfinished. “I hope you guys know that the work you’re doing is evil.”

Quimbly took a sip of wine and gave me a smile after she left the room. “You sure she’s the one?” he asked. “You might want to take a closer look there, buddy.” He stayed long enough to finish his dinner and fix himself another drink, and then, when I said it was probably best I see him tomorrow, he left. I cleared the dishes from the table and went into the bedroom, where Cynthia sat reading.

“I can’t believe you work with that asshole.”

“You guys didn’t get off to the best start,” I admitted. “He’s actually a good guy; he just likes to push people’s buttons. He’s a brilliant designer.”

“That kind of brilliance I can do without.” She looked at me for the first time since I’d entered the room. “His fetish is getting inside people’s heads. That’s why he likes being, what did you call it, the ‘control group’? Control freak is more like it. He loves that he controls your memories—you’re his guinea pigs.”

In retrospect, I can see that this was precisely what Quimbly was doing. I’d thought of him as a friend—and maybe Barrett and I were as close to friends as Quimbly would ever be capable of—but deep down, we were just social experiments to him. I couldn’t see it then, though, and was angry at Cynthia for calling our work evil and me a guinea pig.

“It’s no different than what you do,” I said before I could stop myself. “You only want
real
memories based on
your
plans for us. You talk about a farmhouse that doesn’t even exist yet. You want to create my memories as much as he does.”

She looked at me for a moment before turning back to her book. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s why I have a company worth millions, and you’re just reading a book.”

“Here,” she said, tossing me a pillow. “How about we sleep apart tonight.”

And so I went back into the living room and lay on the couch, late into the night, wondering why I’d defended Quimbly against the woman who loved me. Perhaps this proved everything Cynthia was trying to tell me—that he’d already gotten so deeply into my head that I’d willingly hurt anyone who reminded me, not out of control but out of love, that I’d never been to Russia or had a brother. It was this thought that brought me back to the bedroom, to climb beneath the sheets and to hold her, telling her I was sorry and that I wanted to make memories together.

*   *   *

IT WAS HARD
to shake the memory of our first real fight. In the months that followed, Cynthia and I avoided that night with Quimbly, and I made an effort to be more present. We went for walks, ate at our favorite bistro, and we’d return to my apartment and make love. But there was a growing distance between us, and when she’d fall asleep, I’d edge my way out of bed to beam high-end memories in the darkness of our bathroom. It was, I realize now, a time when I had everything: a woman who loved me, a company worth millions, and bidders waiting in line to buy us out. Quimbly was calling us the history-makers. It was a time when I believed we would become the masters of the world. Then we destroyed it all.

“We’ll make a fortune,” Quimbly said, putting his palms together.

“What exactly are you suggesting?” I asked.

“Simple ad placement. We layer one into your Cuba memory. Show sweat beading along a glass of Coke, carbonation fizzing. We’re talking big money for a single placement.”

Barrett was deadly silent. Over the past weeks he’d become increasingly taciturn, but this was something different. His lips were working back and forth against each other as though he was grinding his teeth.

“We’re selling out?” I asked.

“Just being practical. They’re lining up at our door. We could own the world.”

“Enough!”
Barrett ordered, his voice echoing in the beams.

“Hold on,” Quimbly said. “You haven’t heard me out.”

“You dare argue with me?”
Barrett boomed, his fingers clenching. “Do you know who I am? I am the Lord of lords and the King of kings; I am the alpha and omega; I am the Lord Supreme.” He rose from his seat, stepping onto the couch and lifting his hands into the air as though holding a staff. “You, who sow discontent, shall be crucified! Your hands and feet shall be cut off—”