Vivian is dancing on a waxed mahogany floor. This memory is not her memory, but she follows the motions anyway. Rock step, triple step, triple step. Her soles bounce on the barren concrete. Her limbs don’t match the memory-body’s proportions. She’s too tall, too clumsy. She executes a spin as if her body stood a foot shorter. She stumbles.
It’s a good memory, though. She could have chosen much worse. Her roommate — the one so far along the process she needs reminding why she’s here — got a memory of her son’s third birthday party. The roommate doesn’t have a child. She doesn’t know where the boy came from or where he’s gone, but she knows she loves him in a deep, crushing, hard-to-breathe way.
The leftover edges of Vivian’s memory, the original memory, still linger in her head. Her father was yelling, his face a garish red. Her feet stepped along to energetic brass band music. He’d come home early, but she didn’t know why. She was dancing and sobbing and twirling. She was wringing blood stains from a green knit sweater sleeve. A weight settled.
That brick of perpetual nausea doesn’t confine itself to Vivian’s stomach, but spreads its load across her arms, her shoulders, her eyelids, her toes. She didn’t mean it. She remembers that much. He was twice her size, and she was afraid. It might have been self-defence. But would she be here if it had been? The rest is gone. Exchanged.
*****
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
Vivian’s first tech was so patient, letting her scroll for an hour through the catalogue of memories, searching for a new past. The next one wires her up and hits shuffle like a music player. You get what you get, no complaining. Memory rehabilitation isn’t designed as punishment, but what she did deserves punishment. (Doesn’t it?) She expects cruelty. Craves it. These machines and wires alone cannot absolve her.
She hopes they take the sentencing next: the image of the judge’s frown as she recounted that now-erased day. Every detail. (She doesn’t remember her actions, but she remembers remembering them.) Her father’s absence in the courtroom. She pleaded guilty. Begged guilty. Begged them to fix her. Begged them to excise this part of her brain. But she doesn’t choose what goes and what stays. The techs remove and replace everything deemed incompatible with a rehabilitated life.
*****
Vivian is standing at the edge of a beach in an unknown country, turquoise water carving dimples in the sand around her toes. There are only good memories in the database, all volunteered by model citizens who believe that she, too, can rejoin society — whole and human. But good is context-dependent and she doesn’t get the context. She is at the water’s edge of an unknown country and she doesn’t know how she got there or how she returned. When she looks down, the sand is now a concrete floor. Her roommate grumbles at her to get some sleep.
Your brain will rewire its history. You took a plane to a beach then flew back. Don’t overthink it.
That’s right, she was on a plane.
The next tech gives her three minutes to search through the catalogue while he jams electrodes onto the base of her skull. She chooses quickly. Doesn’t overthink it. When the process is done, even her memories of this facility will be rewritten.
*****
Vivian is raising a toast at a friend’s wedding. The guests are strangers, but she talks with them like old college friends.
