Memory Latch.
Christopher Howland, 2002.
Cool air caressing exposed flesh. Soft sheets wrapped around legs and waist. Muted light through tinted windows. His mouth tastes of last nights wine and… something else. Someone stirs beside him and he is suddenly awake. Briefly, his mind spins, wondering who it could be, coming up blank. He risks a glance. Leeta. His friend Leeta. She is sprawled naked beside him, stirring again as he starts in surprise. What the hell is she doing here? Not that waking up with Leeta is in any way a bad thing. On the contrary, she is stunningly gorgeous, a mutual friend in his social coterie and genuinely fine company. Periodically he has indulged fantasies not unlike the current circumstance. Alas, he’d never thought she was particularly interested. The problem is that he doesn’t recall how she got there, or indeed the previous night as a whole.
Sitting up slowly, careful to avoid rousing her, he glances around the room. His bedroom, his apartment, their clothes scattered about the place. The residence interface, a fold up desktop terminal, shows bland stand-by, clock reading seven hours since last active, basic stats for room temperature, illumination, proximity sensors scrolling like a screen saver. But no memory cues. Fuck it. Try the easy way. He thinks, fingers already fumbling for the memory latch grafted into the base of his skull. Instant mnemonic recall at the turn of a dial. In theory the device, a relatively unobtrusive implant, serves to stimulate and collate data stored on the neural pathways pertaining to memory. In practice nothing is as simple as theory. He sets the dial to three.
Recollection comes through sharp. He jolts, some unexplained shock. A flash of last night, usurped by the pervasive flicker of police lights on armoured vehicles.
Leeta stretches, glorious feminine curves arching, and draws him back down to the mattress, pressing herself against his body.
‘Hmmm. It’s nice to see you in the morning.’ She speaks quietly.
‘Yea.’ He stares at the ceiling for a moment. The image of police lights still with him. ‘Um… What happened last night?’ he asks before thinking. Leeta giggles mischievously before answering.
‘Hm. Well, you drank quite a bit. And so did I. And then we sort of… Hey, you don’t regret it do you?’ Her tone shifts slightly, a note of disappointment.
‘Regret it? Hell no.’ he assures. ‘Not with you. I just wish, well, I wish I could better remember how we got here.’ One arm wrapped around Leeta, the other hand gropes behind his skull, turning the latch to four.
Smoother transition this time. Cleaner recollection.
‘Hey, what was with Anthony last night?’ he thinks to ask as remembered sensations pour through. They’d all been at a bar last night, a group of half a dozen or so, and Anthony had been indulging in one of his little rants. This one had been on his increasingly favoured theme: Lambasting the woes of machinery in people.
‘Too much metal corrodes the soul, man.’ he spouted, restless in his chair. Agitated.
‘Stop messing around with your dial.’ Leeta suggests. She kisses his neck, arms drawing him closer. A smile in her voice. ‘Mess around with me instead.’ Then she gently mocks, ‘Too much metal corrodes the soul, man.’
‘Yea. O.K.’ For a moment he relents, turning to the intimacy of her warm body, then turns the dial a further notch anyway.
Deeper memory reconstruction. Set to five now. Was he really that drunk last night, to need five? He wouldn’t bother, but something nags at him. Something just beyond recollection. And he still doesn’t know exactly how Leeta came to his bed. Five takes time. A deeper probe into poorly correlated and cued neural patterns. To make sense of the garbled sensations the processor needs to reconstruct some links to working memory. For a moment he is newly aware of the machine; microprocessor wet-wired to neural lace, enveloping his cerebrum in a nano-fine mesh. Output and feedback all centring upon the Latch hard-point, seemingly just a dial protruding from living skin. Leeta stays close to him as he slips into recall. Her presence is nice, but somehow odd.
‘Did you know they can transfer memory files now?’ Anthony asked. ‘Saw it on a fucking covert exposé doco. This fat fucking cable coming out of a cranial Latch, just like ours, man. Fucking download from one to another. Fucking sick shit man. I reckon the cops will use it for interrogations and shit.’
It fades out for a moment, waiting for number five to finish the job… They’d mocked him last night. Just another of his excited rants, not to be taken seriously. Still, the dial had eight settings. How advanced could the recognition systems get? How much was hardware and how much still relied on the underlying neural meat? Leeta had chimed in, wondering if the download could be made two ways, in real-time.
‘Think about the sex…’ She’d mused.
‘Cool. Hey, do you know that sex doll companies make them out of tank grown flesh now?’ Larry asked. ‘They used to custom make sex dolls out of latex. Pick and choose the details from a web catalogue. Now they use tank cultures… Gotta keep them plugged into a wall socket though, so the meat stays stimulated, or its muscles atrophy and all the autonomic nerves fuck up.’
‘You know way too much about the wrong things.’ Leeta observed. Everyone chuckled briefly, before Larry insisted,
‘Yea, but think about it. You get a meat doll. Hook up a mnemonic plug to, like, an expanded database or some shit, and download all your favourite sexual techniques.’
‘You’re a sick man.’ Leeta decided.
‘But that’s it, man!’ Anthony ranted. ‘You could have all your memories, your fucking personality, downloaded by some dirty cops or something, then hooked up to a meat puppet and then… Fuck, it would be like part of you. Whoring your mind, man!’
‘Aw, fucking hell. You’ve gone and set him off.’ he’d said, grinning at Anthony’s manic gesturing. Then Leeta asked what Anthony had been plugging into recently. It should have been a joke, should have been harmless, but…
Memory cuts out. A sudden, clean break. But why? Such a cut is highly unusual, even for a latch recall. As though the rest has been code locked, or artificially repressed.
‘What else happened last night?’ he ventures, turning to Leeta.
‘Well, where do you want me to start?’ she asks, smiling in a manner that would, on any other day, turn him to putty in her expert hands.
Fuck it. Turn the dial to eight. Something subconscious knows, and knows that it matters. Otherwise the missing time wouldn’t mess with him so much. Retrieval takes over, driving his mind to the verge of a migraine. Leeta sits up, arms crossed, drawing her legs up to her body. She is decidedly unimpressed, and it shows on her face; beautiful, sculpted features set to a scowl. She asserts that he is supposed to give her attention, not mess about with memory plugs. They just spent the night together…
Problems arise at this level. Memory is partly a constructed phenomenon. Select stimuli, keys, are laid down as retrieval cues, with selected emphasis. In all memory there are gaps; bits of information not noticed well enough as they occurred, not set to long-term storage. As memory they simply don’t exist. The full picture we experience is partly imagined. Gaps are bridged with analogues taken from other memories, to compliment the mind’s subconscious expectations. Thus even the deepest retrieval can only accomplish so much.
The argument had gone thermal at some point, almost naturalists versus pro-augmentation, a classic debate. Anthony was in full stride: Too much metal in everyone’s head, too many cosmetic enhancements and so forth. Something had really been eating at Anthony. He’d left in a truly foul mood. Worried that she might have upset him, pushed him too far with her witty gibes, Leeta had followed him out, saying
‘Better make sure he’s going to be O.K.’
Memory began to clear a few minutes later, context finding some foundation, specifics coming into focus, about when he’d got up to follow. It seemed wise to check that they were all right outside the pub, and not destroying their periodically volatile friendship.
The air was December warm outside the climate-controlled bar. The bustle of many voices replaced by the hum of busy streets. The generic smell of unfiltered pollution. They weren’t immediately visible, so he strolled around the side, into the car park, then into a slightly recessed area near the service entrance. He found them both in the glare of an overhead spotlight. Shock made him halt, staring fixedly. ‘Anthony…’ he began, in a voice quiet and distant, ‘where is her skin?’
Anthony was squatting, hunched over her body, as it lay sprawled; slick red feminine curves, steel and polymer augmentations, grafts and sculpted anatomy all visible, overlayed by natural meat. But no skin. Her memory latch was a glistening protrusion from an alloy skull plate.
‘So much metal.’ Anthony quivered, in a traumatized child’s voice. ‘Where is all the flesh gone?’
‘Anthony…’ he managed again, though his whole body was frozen. ‘Anthony.’ He looked up, wide eyes mournful. ‘Anthony… What did you do with her skin?’
Leeta’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him softly. Recall is replaced by the demands of the moment, shut down and leaving him blisteringly aware of its absence.
‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ she asks, worried. She is still in bed with him. ‘You looked way fucked up there for a moment.’ Her fingers caress the back of his neck, finding the dial, and resetting it to zero. ‘You should leave that thing alone. I think it fucks with you too much.’
He turns to face her, meets her deep eyes, alive with personality and compassion, set within flawless skin. Her memory plug a subtle protrusion in the base of her skull.
cognitionfatigue 