The Gnome Stories, page 19
I should tell you now that I haven’t been completely honest. Or I haven’t told you all of it. I knew the identity of the client coming into this job. It doesn’t matter if I’d seen the tapes or not. Because her work is so well known and because of the questions that have been floating around the media about the famous tape, I knew it would be her when I got the call and saw the contract terms. I said yes. I didn’t have a choice, but if I did I would have said yes.
I never touch the product, but this time while I’m here I am going to make some edits. I’m using her memories as a kind of installation. Don’t worry: I’ve made sure she’s insulated. She won’t suffer for the additions, nor will she ever know, if I do it well. I’m just making a few edits that will manifest themselves in a future song she will write. She’ll believe she’ll write it—in fact, she will write the song, it’ll all be hers, the melodies, the beats—but the thing will hatch from the eggs I’ve left, a few bits of suggestive data. I’ve placed them here for you, my dear, my ex, my former. I know it’s wrong to do, but I don’t care. Sometimes you do things that are wrong because you care. I figure this is my last chance to make the kind of gesture to prove you can believe in me, that I know what it means to want to be heard like that.
So we move back into the masturbation memory and track back through the corridor toward the complex where the client’s song ideas are centered. She doesn’t know this: the contract specifies that she must not know. Some believe that knowing where it comes from ruins it, whatever that it is for anyone. But for me it wasn’t hard to see: it all comes out of here, this room. As soon as we dropped in here it was obvious, but it took a second pass through to be sure. Catalysts all over the corridor light up: they connect vertically and tendril out into moments from her musical career, right up to the present. It’s like the room had been mined a hundred times: I’ve never seen one like it before, so familiar and so well used. Most of her listeners don’t believe she even writes her own stuff. Well, I can tell you that she does and it comes out of here. So few of her contemporaries do. It’s hard to believe in anything, even the inconsequential stuff.
So these eggs: I mean eggs like Easter eggs. I’m burying them here. It won’t take long for them to appear in a song: maybe a month to incubate, maybe a year. I’ll be gone by then but you’ll hear it one day and you’ll think of me: you’ll know that I was here and I contributed to this; I defaced this one memory and did so with your name. It’s unusual enough and you’re self-conscious enough about it that you’ll know it must have been me. Who else would it be? Just wait and see, I mean to say. Just listen on the radio for our song.
Caribou looks at me as I pop the panel off a section—a photograph of two people out along a dock and the sunset stretching beyond them toward infinity—the effect is of these two people being flattened by the sky and sea—I can’t tell just which two they are—the client and her dad, mayhap—and I start inserting code. I can tell by her posture that she wonders what I’m doing. This questioning is coded in her. She is not just my partner in this place: she also logs events.
I try to keep the connection hidden as I tweak. All I need is plausible deniability. I tell her I’m checking on some underlying code. This is true. She can also tell when I’m straight-up lying, since she’s wired right into me. It’s necessary to keep her a little in the dark. If her emotional barometer registers betrayal she’ll be obliged to propagate a message out. I’d have to tweak her code first, which I only sort of know how to do. It’s possible I’d disable her in the process. It would be difficult to explain to management. So I ask her to check the father’s speech patterns against some of the other ones we’ve listened to instead. I thought I heard a discrepancy, is what I say. We need to track that down. She turns away to listen. It keeps her busy while I work.
We’re in one of the sex sections, here in some version of her father’s porn library, where most of the client’s songs originate, even the ones not obviously about sex. She’s alone: there’s no father here. We’re a little older: sixteen or seventeen, maybe, feeling a little more assured than we are used to. This is a place we’ve come to often. He’s off somewhere unknowable, so she’s left to catalog and to peruse. She could read anything here, do anything here. It’s a weird mix of safety and possibility: either way, electricity. You can feel it almost crackle. I thought at first it was fiction—I mean friction, static generating between our ass and the fabric of the chair in the dry air—but it’s not. It’s something else, excitement literalized. The room is almost fully lit with the seams coming off books all over the shelves and the three screens built into the entertainment center. I put my hand out to them and get a little shock.
Even though the memories are more of awkwardness and archiving than sex somehow this is what she taps into when she tries to write. I don’t know why or what to make of that. I don’t know how exactly she gets back here or why here is where she goes, but this is where it happens. If I were another kind of person I could disable almost everything in this hallway and render her inert. What would it mean to be someone capable of that? Am I capable of that? I tell myself that what I’m doing here is smaller: just an edit doesn’t matter. I believe that. I’m pretty sure I believe that. All I’m doing is adding to the mix. It’s like we’re collaborating. I should get a writing credit.
Death doesn’t have to end it. That was the Saudis’ idea, why we preserved as much as we could of the royal family. How much of an afterlife could they buy? As it turned out, we could migrate only three of them to the servers with any kind of completeness. That was after an intensive effort that lasted years and is still ongoing, as far as I know. I was only there for one year of it. They rotated all the techs in and out so none of us could feel proprietary. What was there of them—maybe a hundred thousand corridors apiece, judging from the maps I saw—was too immense and complicated to completely port. We had to make decisions about what could come and what would not. I was surprised we could even make reasonable simulacra and uneasy about the choices made: the patriarch, of course, and two of his twelve sons, one of which was the one with prognostications.
We got the outlines of everyone else that they requested, but had to focus on only certain knots of most of them, so they were more like ghosts: they were there if you looked at them from five angles or followed them for five stories (the going standard for a casual facsimile), but beyond that they just turned and disappeared. I don’t need to tell you that all of this work has metaphysical ramifications. The philosopher-consultants are paid to sort that out.
The upshot is that it turns out we can preserve a lot of it, what makes you you, what makes you think like you do, feel like you do, hurt like you do, act like you do. Almost all your tendernesses can be migrated to the servers if there is money enough and will. But there’s no interface out, no mechanism to interact with the world, to learn, experience: at that point you’re disconnected from the world. All you can do is to relive your past and interact with the simulacra in the adjacent suites in ways consistent with your memories and theirs.
I imagine the three of them floating in the cooled towers of the subterranean server rooms, if they’re anywhere, playing Go (for some reason they were all in love with Go). I mean they’re playing playing Go: they’re just reenacting former games of Go they’ve played together, recombining existing things. Maybe they are solving Go eternally, constructing some kind of biological proof. The servers are protected against intrusion and are off the grid entirely. When we’re done no one will know that they were kept this way, that they’re still out there in the darkness, lit up from time to time by LEDs. In this way they are entombed like pharaohs, surrounded by their familiars and their sigils and their gear. I like to think of them howling at each other’s imperfect preservations, stymied by a memory that they know somehow is missing but that cannot form and cannot change, a dead-end passageway, tormented by what they were always tormented by, plus the knowledge of their incompletion. Clearly I still harbor a little bit of anger toward those who can afford the work we are tasked to do.
Caribou has finished with her voice analysis and has turned her attention back to me. It’s obvious from her eyes that she’s concerned. She sends a query and I deflect it. Everything here’s a little slower than I thought, so she was able to finish her calculations in the lag while I was still twitching at the panel. I’m out of practice and my certifications are a year out of date, which matters more than I expected. I’m working as fast as I can, but Caribou moves in toward me to register her concern and get a closer look.
As she comes over to record what I’m doing I say oh! look out! and I don’t want to do it but I don’t seem to have a choice, and while her head is pivoting to follow my gaze I don’t mean to do it, and it takes longer than it should, and I’m watching myself doing it even as I’m doing it, but still even I have to admit I’m in the moment doing it: I pick up a book, a big one called Innocence: The Human Form, which features, I find out after, soft-lit, arty shots of nude teenage girls. I grab it from a low shelf, hit her with it, and she goes down. I kneel beside her as her eyelights flicker and go dim.
I look away.
I throw up in a trash can that’s barely finished rendering.
I tell myself to make a note of its inconclusiveness. Why’s there even a trash can in this memory?
I know what I have to do to protect myself, so—tenderly, for what it’s worth, and in touching her this way I realize we’ve never touched before, not really, aside from brushing by each other in slow motion—I locate the seam up where her head meets her neck and slide my finger underneath the flap and flick her into standby and back on. I should have about fourteen minutes before her system will automatically reboot and she’ll recognize the outage in the log, so I’ll need a story.
I finish up my edit in the room and say lo, let there be light as I get the panel on and the room flickers for a second and then lights up, and then I watch as catalysts propagate the edit, each of them lighting up just for a second like I imagine lightning bugs must after mating, or maybe in anticipation of mating. I wish I could share the sight with Caribou. Then I go to work on her. I only have a couple of minutes left.
When she comes back online, I’m holding her. I’ve made up the scene: bookshelves collapsed, books everywhere, all over the two of us. I’ve suffered an injury myself, from which the blood has leaked from my scalp over my face. Are you okay? I say. It takes a minute before she responds, clearly trying to sort through data and figure out what happened, and her heartlight clicks. Mine clicks back. I don’t know what happened. I was checking code and maybe I knocked something over: the whole thing just collapsed. I don’t know how long we were out, I say.
Does she believe me? I’m not sure.
That’s never happened in here before, I say. Do you understand what it might mean? She shakes her head a little. Anyway, it’s not important, I don’t think. Make your notes as quickly as you can. We need to level out of here if it’s gone unstable. As if to echo this, I think I feel a little tremor. It’s very slight. Did you feel that? I ask. Her sensors are more finely tuned than mine, but they’re not all the way online. Since I trimmed it out she has no memory of what happened just a bit ago and so that gap might disrupt her for some time. She says she didn’t feel anything at all. She just looks at me. She asks: Are you okay? You don’t look okay.
I wipe away a smear of blood. I’m fine, I say.
Then she asks: What were you doing with the code?
Then she asks: How did the bookshelf collapse?
Then she asks: Is it possible that what you were doing caused the bookshelf to collapse? Could it have caused the tremor?
There’s no way I could have caused the tremor. The more I say this the more I start to believe it.
Then she says: I seem to be missing something.
I say: I’m missing something too. I remember the collapse and I remember coming to among the books and you. But I don’t know what happened in between.
She says: I seem to be missing something.
I say: Do you want me to clip in to you and run a diagnostic?
She shakes her head.
She says: something’s different from when we were here before.
As I turn away I notice another book lit up on the shelf.
I go over to it. I say given what happened to us before I don’t think we should spend any more time here than we have to.
She just looks at me.
I say you need to come with me. I say: I need you, Caribou.
I waste no time following the catalyst out.
Instead of taking us back to the Christmas scene, the catalyst drops us somewhere else. Same room in a different time. What changed? We’re bent over his lap. He is hitting us. I can barely see the room. The pain reverberates. Can’t see his face though I turn my head to try. All the detail is on the floor or on the bookshelf where we are facing. There’s the book. Next to it is one that takes its title from the egg I planted in the other room. I don’t know what to do with that. Things are propagating really fast.
Since I’m the lead I’m the one who’s being hit. It doesn’t leave me any room for doing anything except receiving blows. Midswing I nod to Caribou and signal her to take a look at the book. She does and says it’s blank inside. Then she watches me. Are the others blank inside? I ask. In slow-mo I take a blow. It brings pain but more than pain. It’s slow—running at about a 1.5—and so I can actually feel the sensation spread through my body, water coming up over rocks and trickling down, and slowly ebbing so it’s just a memory just in time for the next one to come. It’s disconcerting, tracking it. I wonder if this is some kind of punishment. No, it’s just this one, she says.
It hasn’t taken long for that egg to propagate. Is that even the metaphor I want? I wonder. I check my clock. We only have a few hours left before the forensics team moves in. We need to be out soon, Caribou says.
I know, I say, as best I can. I’m breathless here. Hand me the book.
She looks at me. It’s not a catalyst, she says.
I know, I say. But it wasn’t here before. I just want to see it.
I hear the sound of being hit before I feel the smack.
She hands me the book. Father doesn’t notice. Father never notices. He can’t notice. He’s in a loop. We’re the only ones with agency in these memories.
I look at the book. It’s just a standard cover with the title of the egg. As I open it I see it’s filling page by page. I can’t read the book. You can’t ever read books, because they’re not encoded fully. Unless you’re a freak you don’t remember books word for word. You remember what they were to you, what you brought to them, what you took from them, what you left there of yourself or someone else, maybe. They’re here as little smears of memory, vectors and connections, like the role a star plays in a constellation. Sometimes you get a headline or a line from one, the sense of what a chapter might have been like, or a particularly vivid couple of sentences. Any more and it trips a flag. When this book fills in it fills for me. It wouldn’t fill for Caribou because she has less subjectivity.
Ever read while being hit? It’s hard. So I don’t. At best I try to get a little bit of it. For some reason the bits I’m able to make out fill me with sadness. It’s like pain recorded. Maybe that’s on account of being spanked and being fifteen here, too old, I think for spanking.
Caribou watches as I’m hit again.
I reach back and grip the hairbrush that he’s using to spank me with and take the fork.
Once I saw the Saudi family’s bodies suspended in the operating room as we worked on them. I didn’t have clearance to get inside the clean room itself, but everyone could see the tent. They were in the great cavern, the biggest part of the complex on what was once the lowest level. Even now they were digging more below. How low could we go, I wondered, knowing there probably was no answer as long as the money held. It was cold enough already that the jumpsuits we wore had to be upgraded with insulation. So in this big room, maybe a hundred feet across and twenty feet high, there they were, the bodies: up on metallic platforms in what looked like interconnected kiddie pools filled with some kind of gel, all underneath what reminded me of a circus tent in panels of alternately clear and blue. You couldn’t see in from outside since the tent had concentric rings with the colors staggered. But if you got up a little, by the supply shop where you had to pick up a transistor package, say, you could see in just enough. There they were, the three primaries, as well as a dozen secondaries. They didn’t look like anything, really. They weren’t yet dead, though you wouldn’t call them alive. They looked like experiments. They weren’t nude—instead, they had insisted they must all stay wrapped, no matter what happened. The room inside was clean since any outside influence could affect the chemical mix they would be kept in as long as possible to rip their memories and organize them on the servers. I remember being surprised they were so small. They were the center of everything—we were at the center of everything, the center of the center of this weird country, underneath the surface what must be close to a mile, just off the bluffs that looked out into the sea. It felt like the whole world was concentrated on them at this very moment, as we stripped level after level of data out of them, working against time to make them into—what? homunculi? simulations? frozen libraries of who they thought they were to each other, and thus who they were? I couldn’t make sense of it. I felt paralyzed. From my vantage point I could see my way down two of the polished corridors that fed into this room. Because of the way they reflected lights from as far down as you could see before they turned, they looked a little bit like infinity.
