The Gnome Stories, page 18
The forensic technicians will be here soon to look at the code. Caribou says we’ve got another thirty-six hours before they arrive, and we absolutely have to be gone or the contract’s void.
The abuse scene is the one that leaked, the one we’re contracted to investigate. They still don’t know how it got out. Hackers, supposedly, but I don’t see how you could get that much data out of here what with the built-in controls. Getting in is one thing, doable, since the human mind has its default passwords and rootkits, too, and once you’re in it’s not hard to narrow down some of the codes and access the protected areas if you know what you’re doing and come prepared. But getting anything of any size out of here is beyond my comprehension. They would have had to have a team. They’d have to have had access to her for a couple of days. The client had a security kit installed a year after she got big. I looked at the paperwork on the way down so we could navigate our way through. She should have been secured against intrusion, and it should have been impossible to exit with any data without a fail-safe that would have shut her down for a couple of weeks, and imagine all the attention that would have come with that.
The creepy thing is that people paid for it, this data, these fucked-up memory tapes. It leaked and a lot of people paid a lot of money to access it because of her celebrity, because they believe they can know her through a tape. Maybe they just want to see her hurt. I bet some do. The question is: Was the tape real? Was it a prefab or a plant, as the client’s people claimed? How did its details connect or hold up when you pushed on them? This matters in the courts, and for her father, who now stands accused, of course, but it matters more for the narrative her people are trying to make. Even though the client didn’t bring forth any accusations at first, when the tape came out it was hard to get around what everyone who cared to could see that he’d done and people wondered publicly why she hadn’t come forth, so she had to. Which is ridiculous. Millions of people never come forth with stuff like this—and worse—for a million reasons, many of them good, and all of them understandable if you get to experience what it is like to be them. But online everything gathered steam and now phalanxes of lawyers were involved. Hence Caribou’s and my doing this recon as commissioned by the client’s counsel. We found some vulnerabilities in security and emotional response; we also found inconsistencies in a few scenes, so we do have something to report along with the maps. I look back at Caribou and she’s looking at me, her wide eyes wider than I remember. I see myself in them before she blinks. That’s odd, I think.
Disturbingly, it’s not unusual to experience arousal in a client’s memory. Even in the darker corners of these memories, we’re always bodies, learning how to be bodies, controlled by subroutines we can barely fathom. So every little interaction—the sound of a hairbrush being stroked through hair—can sear itself in our psyches in unexpected ways. Thus hiccup fetishes, choking fetishes, burning fetishes, fetishes for Santa or for Satan or for girls dressed like demons, for professors or confessors, amputation fetishes, fetishes for fire or being burned, for acting like crash test dummies and being acted on in fantasies. You know how it is. The brain wets down and swallows things in ways the daylight mind doesn’t want to have to handle. So it presses on all of this, and each night these corridors go a little further subterranean.
Maybe you’re thinking it’s like a video game dungeon with nice clean corridors and decorations on the walls: sconces, paintings, chains, whatever. It’s more like an anthill than that, more chaotic, with dozens or hundreds of passageways that go up and out and curl around each other, kind of like models of the nervous system, actually, with its nodes and branches, cluster after cluster. The density and patterning vary from client to client, but when you look at the maps we make, memory tends to look like memory, massed and knotted. The lower you go, typically, the further back, so when you’re mapping you try to find your way back to the root. It’s like being at the dentist when they press on the soft spots of your tooth and when you feel the shooting pain rise up in response you know you’ve found something you can follow.
Caribou and I came down through an opening from a Christmas six years later, and before I could even mark it on my chart, we could see that our way in was gone. If it gets real bad we could always fail-safe out, but it voids the contract when that happens, and this is an important contract, and besides we never fail-safe out. We always find a way, as Caribou says. We need the contract. We need the money. I need the money. I need to make a point. I need a win.
I guess I want to say it’s not important what I did. Or didn’t do. I can’t even be sure I did what my ex said I did, but I did something. Something was done by me. Mistakes were made. I guess we all did some things or else we wouldn’t be here spelunking in someone else’s fucked-up history. Did or didn’t do. That is, I don’t believe I really did it. I don’t remember doing it. It doesn’t seem like something I’d do. It’s not my way to respond to barbs with force. I remember having done it but not doing it. Wouldn’t I remember doing it if I did it?
They won’t say so but all of this, really, any memory, nearly, can be coded and implanted. With the proper privileges you can make most people believe that anything has happened to them. You don’t even need to code it, really. They proved this back in the early aughts. You can do it just through intensive interviews. The success rate then was only about twenty percent, but that’s a lot of people believing in things that never truly happened. You can always fool some of the people some of the time. Now our success rate is better than ninety-five percent. I’ve seen it. I can’t talk about it here. It’s illegal but not unpopular.
It’s much harder to redirect a memory if the client is meant to be the actor in the scene and not just the one who’s acted on. That requires a complete confab of several interconnected levels; it unbalances whole wings of the ego system. But if you have the money and the time and the permission and don’t mind doing it on the sly the services are available—overseas or in portable labs like this one we’re in now. We’re not supposed to know where it is, of course, but it’s obvious we’re at sea somewhere. I don’t know what else would explain the rocking. Usually those who have this done are those who want to forget—not remember. But forgetting is just another kind of memory, a screen-and-stitch job, and you have to work in something else where the excised stuff once was.
So, I told my wife, if we can do these things—not just if but that we can, and that we do, and that I do—and I know I shouldn’t have, but I had to tell her. This complicated things for me with the company and didn’t help at home. That we can do them means that we can’t know what we did or did not do, to whom, and when and where. It doesn’t mean we’re not responsible, I know. I was caught in a bind here: I was and was not responsible; if I didn’t do it, then I couldn’t be held responsible, but was what she wanted for me to be responsible? To evade or take responsibility? I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. All I saw in her eyes was horror, which I took to be horror at the work I did, that I had done these things and developed these beliefs in secret for years, but it was also horror at not telling her, horror at holding these things in even as I held her close, horror at throwing her whole life into question, horror at not knowing this whole world had opened up within me and thus within us, even as we had reproduced, and there was no going back after this point. I had changed. Her sense of me was gone, and in its place there was a wizened, weakened thing.
I couldn’t even understand what I had wrought with my actions and then with my omissions. I wasn’t even sure that I had done anything at all or that any of us had done anything at all. I kept saying this. I clung to this. I believed it—truly. She said I wasn’t fit to be a parent and I wasn’t fit to stay with her. That I needed to go away. I didn’t know what else to say or do. So I agreed. By then I was in a pretty lonely place, and so I took myself away, ostensibly to try to fix my shit, but I took the silence and the time and loneliness as an opportunity to try to build her something big, to make a gesture that proved not only that I was an actor, capable of action—a protagonist—but that I acted as I always did for her, that I was trying to protect her, not just obscure my own cowardice. I was pretty sure. Knowing what I know makes it hard to live without a certain sophistic streak. She was not impressed by any of my explanations. I knew she wouldn’t be, which is why I didn’t mean to tell her and she cracked me open like a clam on a rock and there was no gathering all of it back up.
The unpredictability of memory and self is in part why you can’t operate on yourself. It’s not because some kind of time travel paradox arises: after all, what is memory but haunting our own corridors and remaking them, over and over? That happens organically through the process of remembering and renarrativizing: you don’t need a tech to do it for you. But to enter in your own head as a tech means you have to take two perspectives in your self at once, and the strain of that potentially blows the fantasy and wrecks the head. It can’t be sustained. At least, that’s what we know so far. Every so often someone tries to do it: they can’t resist. And technically you can. You can do it. Go in and tweak some of your own code. But tweaking that code—and even exploring your levels as the kind of ghosts we manifest as—poses major dangers. It’s like a brain surgeon operating on his own brain. Or that’s not a good analog at all: it’s not brain surgery, or not directly. Brain surgeons actually can operate on themselves, since the majority of those surgeries are automated now, done by robots with guided lasers that exceed the stability of the human hand. Plus, brain surgeons tend not to trust anyone else at the helm when it comes to anything, especially themselves. Still: you need to have another medical professional present in case it all goes wrong.
You’d have to be crazy to go inside yourself. Most people’s brains can’t bear the strain of doubling. So when you’re in, you’re not a ghost: you’re real. All there. Entire. So there aren’t any fail-safes when it comes to you. Conscious, you’re always shifting. You’d be operating without a net—with no backup and no way out if you got lost or the structure shifted with you in it.
Caribou and I are only paid if we can find our way back out, and we always do. To fail-safe disrupts the work and breaks the client’s brain a little: it’s like burning a man-sized pair of holes right up through everything that might be on top of it, connecting every corridor in unexpected ways. So we’re paid to map and probe and find our way back out without disruption. The most important thing I can do is to map the catalysts, those seams I talked about before. Usually they manifest themselves in light, but sometimes you can find them by noticing repeated symbols or images, or where the detail is the brightest. When we see a detail that we’ve seen in other scenes, we know there might be an opening. It’s not always clear what will lead where. So we handle everything we can in a passageway. Look at it all. Write it down. Touch it to see what’s there.
This is how it works: I grab on to it. If it’s a catalyst I can feel it shift. I get a bit nauseated, as if I’ve been caught in a lie. I can tell there’s something else here, like a doubling. I can choose to follow or leave it be. If I follow it, it’s like I go through a door into another room and Caribou comes trailing after. Usually you can recatalyze and come right back when that room’s been mapped. But other times it’s a one-way trip and you have to find your own way back. The more you know about the systems the easier it is to predict what might lead where, but it takes attention to catalog all the stuff. That’s where Caribou comes in. Her abilities in this regard far outstrip my own.
So in this scene I see a teen magazine advertising a quiz: How Lonely Are You? and when I flip open to that page, it turns out I’ve seen it before, in another room off another corridor, and so when I hold it I can feel there’s something here. When I take the fork, Caribou and I get dropped into a pasture among a whole lot of horses. Caribou calculates that there are eighty-nine. The field is overwhelmingly green. It seems open and stretches on in all directions. A great hay scent is apparent. The horses don’t seem to notice us. This is a lovely break from the claustrophobia of most of these memories. The feeling here—and thus the connection—is a particular brand of loneliness. How could you be lonely among all this movement, this beautiful muscle?
As I walk the perimeter I can tell we’re still constrained. I can see the field beyond but cannot seem to get away from here. I walk, and it feels like I move, but then I’m no farther from the pasture than I was. I’d be terrified, personally. I should be terrified. These are wild horses, much larger than I am. I’m maybe ten here—I can’t tell so easily with girls—with my hands outstretched like I’m a sunflower facing up. I seem to know no fear. I think I’ve just been left, or perhaps this is some kind of mashup of fantasy and memory. I nod at Caribou. As you might guess, one of the horses has genitals. I really don’t want to hold its dick in order to see if it’s a catalyst. Of course it is, I tell Caribou, and say right, just chart it. We already know where this leads. We don’t need to see for sure. She looks at me. I know we have to, but really I don’t want to do it. Instead, I stall. I pretend to be analyzing the scenery in the distance: Is this mountain range familiar? I ask her to check against the database. As we wait it starts to snow. The horses stop what they are doing and look around as if to ask what this stuff is. I hold out my hand. It’s cold and my breath steams up. I watch the snow collect. I lean my head back and stick out my tongue. When a snowflake lands on it I see light and vibration, and I take the opportunity to shift out to whatever snowy scene this catalyst reveals.
It drops us back into Christmas and Dad is downstairs lifting weights. I can hear the grunts and then a telltale clank that means he’s occupied. He’s always in a good mood when he’s done working out, and then he’ll sing for us. He’s got a lovely voice in spite of his many defects, and I can feel the anticipation rising in me to hear it. That’s one thing Christmas means to the client: her dad singing, the little wings of the bird ornaments on the tree sparkling in the light as they turn. This is a very welcome sound because it means we’re back. Outside the window I can see the snow falling. At last, I say, breathing a little easier. I grab Caribou and give her a little hug. She whirs along with me. Mother isn’t here either. I don’t know where she is. She wasn’t here the first time around and she’s still absent in this scene. She’s in very few of the client’s memories. We’ve made notes on that, but it doesn’t seem especially important.
This is where we entered before the catalyst disappeared on us. I take a look at an ornament almost on the top of the tree. It shows some light. This means our route back out of here remains. There’s just one more errand that I need to run before we go.
Being here has everything to do with faith: we’re here because someone can’t believe—not fully, not that kind of solid faith I see (or think I see: every surface concealing a cavern) in, say, the Apostolic Lutherans, the ones who have committed so much to their way of being in the world that you sense that they can’t not believe, that they feel like it would mean the very end of them and of the world they’ve so laboriously constructed around them. They edit their world. We all edit our worlds, but their editing is doctrinaire: certain things are circumscribed by scripture or by decree. Others edit their worlds down by habit, and there’s where I start to feel closer to them: What of this world isn’t accessible to me without my knowledge because of how I’ve been accustomed to acting? And then I must admit the possibility that I am who I am, acting how I act, however that is, however capricious and seemingly learned or ruined, because I’m also at the mercy of these chemical encodings. I’m no more free than anyone, even if I choose to believe I am. I have my rooms and corridors, too, and so do you. And the problem is that they’re unstable.
Being here also means believing in Caribou, having faith in her wiring, to put it bluntly. She’s here to perform calculations that I can’t do unassisted and to uplink us to the larger circuitry, which I also cannot do, and the maps depend on a level of precision I can’t otherwise get at.
She’s a she because maybe of my psych profile or the interviews I went through when I joined, and partly by policy. Studies show it’s easier for heterosexuals to believe in a connection to a virtual other if it’s sexed, even rudimentarily so, and if it’s sexed as the opposite gender. It doesn’t speak well for us, put that way, but there it is. They figure that’s so because we’re more likely to treat the other as a black box, which is basically what Caribou is anyhow, a box with a shit ton of heuristics, and honestly, she can believe, too, she’s pretty advanced, she has to believe in what she is and what she’s capable of, and that there’s something there beyond the programming: she’s programmed to have some emergent behaviors; this is why she’s how she is, a little weird, and weird in response to the way I’m weird, since she’s my partner in this spelunkery, and therefore reads to me as individual and quirky even and she’s easier to love and to believe in, and even knowing that these are expected responses doesn’t honestly diminish them that much: it just layers another complexity atop them to navigate, and it’s increasingly easy to ignore those complexities when you’re wrapped up in a moment as we always are down here and just conflate all of her programming into her, just Caribou, in all of her sweetly digital clicking.
