Uranians, page 3
He had his morning and his day back, suddenly. Peter staggered, weightless, up the walk, back to the idling taxis, and as he did, every person in queue, everyone he’d quietly feared, was shedding dead finches. The folded, rainbowed birds rolled off their scarlet tongues as they yawned, and dropped from their pockets as they took out their hands, and littered the ground in painted piles beneath the rails as far as his heavy eyes could see.
LACUNA HEIGHTS
Andrew knows someone brings him his dry cleaning and he looks forward every week to seeing her, but he can’t picture her face, not quite. Some evenings, he closes the front door behind him and cannot say who was talking to him a moment ago, or where, whether in the lobby or elevator or in the condo itself. You have a ghost, Madeleine tells him, but she means the cat, creeping behind him as he wanders room to room. Nights come too soon, rain dumps out of clear skies. In the morning, Andrew runs on the treadmill for twenty-five minutes and as he showers, promises to push himself to thirty as soon as he shakes off this cold—catches up on sleep—gets his neck thing fixed. And then he’s at work. He understands he took a car but can’t remember doing it. There are no cars on Market Street: none parked, none driving. No one inhabits San Francisco with him until he enters an office tower. It’s quiet enough to hear sparrows moving in the heavy summer trees.
There is a type of dissociation that comes from overwork or exhaustion, his therapist tells him. But she looks embarrassed, even miserable, proposing this explanation.
• • •
SOME YEARS AGO, when Andrew took over the Aleph Corp client account at his firm, he got it into his head that he needed their neurotech installed. His colleagues, his friends, and even friends’ kids had one by one gone under the knife and sat up with a warm glint in their eyes, the whole treasury of human knowledge a mere thought away. Andrew just liked being the guy who remembers your birthday. Now the implant feels like a bullet lodged in his palate and gives him vertigo when it updates. Ads flicker dreamlike over memories of his sister as he jogs.
The Aleph Corporation thinks highly of Andrew’s work and likes him personally. The General Counsel has him and Madeleine over to Los Altos every month, and every month, the GC ticks her head toward her second floor, saying, “Wish you two had wanted kids,” like she’d wanted his to play with or marry hers. Andrew clears his throat, prepared to litigate his life choices in earnest, but Madeleine laughs and wiggles her fingers: “Oh, it would ruin me!” like having kids does something mysterious to your hands. She plays the flute for the orchestra and hardly uses her neurotech because she’s afraid it will spoil her ear.
He loves her, he is certain. Nothing inside him feels unfaithful. He can’t fathom what else he’d want.
“How do I take a snapshot?” Andrew asks her as they leave the GC’s stupendous front porch. “I want to keep you in that dress,” he tells Madeleine, touching a knuckle to his temple, “for whenever I need it.”
Los Altos is black, clouded. Everything smells of the dry eucalyptus trees, which rustle in a salty, sea-acid wind. Madeleine’s heels tick softly on the porch steps—a private sound, yet Andrew’s hackles stir, as though some third person is following close behind him.
“Picture me bathed in a powerful green light, then blink,” she says. Her lips are stained so dark, he can’t see them move when she speaks. “Like Kim Novak in Vertigo.”
He smiles. Andrew is the sort of man pleased to remember that old movies are still in the world, that things his grandparents loved survive in a dizzying, painful new century—when so much has been lost. Drowned. Buried, a long time ago.
Madeleine smiles for the Aleph implant: a tipsy crinkle of her lips. The front door opens; the GC is a solid silhouette backlit against the houselights.
“That subpoena, Andrew,” the GC reminds him, all foreboding.
“Good as gone. The hearing’s Tuesday morning.”
The GC shuts and locks the door.
“Blink, Drew,” Madeleine reminds him, still holding her smile.
• • •
THE ALEPH CORPORATION has been subpoenaed in a federal money-laundering investigation: a bank executive in Cincinnati has been using his implant’s Privacy Mode to conceal reportable transactions, and the feds want Aleph Corp to jailbreak it. The case couldn’t have come at a worse time for the company, right when it’s about to roll out a mid-priced implant to expand its consumer base.
The federal courthouse, renovated, looks nothing like its old self. Andrew arrives early but gets turned around in its endless, gold-lit halls. The checkered tiles are buffed so glossy they lose substantiality, giving him the uneasy illusion of walking on sky, on the murky reflections of himself and the woman behind him.
Andrew is an uneasy person, his anxiety generalized, but he is still a canny litigator. He doesn’t overplay his arguments like the flamboyant Justice attorney, Mr. O’Connor, who minces in and tells the judge Privacy Mode is “custom-made” for “shielding nefarious activities from scrutiny.” Andrew, at the defendant table, assumes a genteel dignity and shakes his head. The senior judge cocks a brow at nefarious.
“Like any search engine, the Aleph implant bundles search data and sells it to advertising partners,” Andrew explains. He knows this judge from other cases. Plain-spoken; hates lawyers’ melodrama; older than his mother and even more baffled by neurotechnology. Andrew takes the turns slowly. “Because the Aleph displays search results in your mind, though, using the same neurochemical processes as waking memory, it can’t distinguish a search result from an organic memory. So, it scoops up and transmits both. Of course, Aleph Corp has the very strictest anonymization and security controls in place, but let’s be honest, you don’t have to be a criminal to want to keep at least some thoughts totally private from data-miners and ad-slingers.”
Mr. O’Connor, in his marigold tie and heavy pear scent, rises angrily, but the judge gestures for him to sit. “We’ll get around to you,” she tells him, then returns to Andrew. “What I don’t understand—and I hope you can illuminate this for me, Mr. Cornejo-Holland, because the world bears illumination—is why isn’t everyone using Privacy Mode twenty-four hours a day, then?”
“Yes, Judge. The trade-off is that once the user exits Privacy Mode, they can’t access any of the thoughts or memories they had while using it. That makes it impractical to use all the time, though it’s still a protection consumers find important. If Your Honor were using Privacy Mode now, for example, you wouldn’t remember any of this hearing later.”
The senior judge smiles faintly. “How horrible.” Andrew and Mr. O’Connor chuckle politely.
Now she lets Mr. O’Connor offer his response. “If you believe Privacy Mode is about consumer protection,” he says, “then I’ve got a Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.”
With dignity, Andrew shakes his head.
The judge orders supplemental briefing on the data subpoena but, in the meantime, grants Mr. O’Connor leave to depose someone at Aleph Corp on how exactly Privacy Mode works.
Andrew exits the federal courthouse and crosses Civic Center Plaza in a rainy fog, weaving through its ranks of pollarded sycamores. The pruned branches, thickened into knobs of tree flesh, look like fists.
In the distance, Andrew makes out tall wading birds, white cranes and snowy, long-necked egrets, filing out of the old BART station. He stares, and in fact these are people, vaulting up the stairs, pitching port and starboard, carrying delivery bags. And the BART entrances aren’t BART anymore, he reminds himself: those tunnels flooded a long time ago. A long time ago. The new system is “U,” for Under. He goes down there every day, but he can’t picture it.
Heartache, under his lungs—why?
He thinks hard, but the thought is already slipping from him.
• • •
“I THINK I’M having an affair,” Andrew tells his therapist.
He is a bulky man, and he sits hunched forward in the berry-red leather armchair, elbows braced on his thighs and his meaty hands dangling between his knees. The trickle of a motorized desk fountain is the only sound in the office. Clear, silky water over edgeless pebbles.
“I mean I’m cheating on Madeleine,” he says. “Maybe,” he says.
“We were talking about your sister,” she redirects, waving her pencil in a circle.
“I want to talk about Madeleine.” Andrew fishes a pebble out of her fountain and thumbs at it. “The memory gaps? I think I’m causing those, on purpose. I don’t know why, yet, but—I mean, I’m forty-seven, married, and making cash transfers I don’t recognize to an unlabeled account. Doesn’t take a detective. It’s depressing. And it’s wrong.”
Today, his therapist wears a gray flannel skirt-suit and wine-dark pumps. She crosses her glossy, knife-like legs.
“What does Madeleine represent to you?”
“What?”
“You love her,” she says. “I accept that. But she’s classy, and old-money, and we both know that means something more to you.”
“I feel like I’m missing something here. Or you are.”
“What does Madeleine think of your sister? Does she blame you?”
Andrew’s eyes narrow. “Blame me for what?”
His therapist sets her notes aside and pulls her chair closer to him.
• • •
HE WANTS TO get something for Madeleine, just in case. Whether he’s cheating or not, he needs to reorient his attention on her, or he’ll lose her, and the world he has with her. Alone in his office, he fumbles the Aleph’s Wi-Fi antennae on and subvocalizes, GOLD—what, gold earrings, maybe? Something musical? But he takes too long to finish the thought, the Aleph executes the search, and his mind cramps with new, sudden memories: bullion hoards inside Fort Knox; gold grains in a black pan; rings; coins; burial regalia in a pyramid; a gilt guitar; champagne-gold wedding shoes. They come as apparitions, as emotions he’s felt before. As if he’s seen before in a dream those wedding shoes. If he concentrates, he can tell the difference. They don’t taste like a real memory: they have that sweet tackiness of wallpaper glue.
“Stop, stop!” he says aloud. He pulls off the Wi-Fi antennae, which are camouflaged as ordinary reading glasses. “Fricking heck.”
Strange, chilly tears are leaking from his eyes and he has an ice-cream headache. Andrew hates his Aleph with the infatuation of a great love.
Is there a way he could prevent himself from activating Privacy Mode? It’s not a feature consumers can disable, only use or not use. But maybe an implant repair tech could do it—some independent neurodentist, nothing Aleph Corp.
After work, he walks home from his last client meeting, in Russian Hill. He scrapes along the yellow center line of Leavenworth. A lonely seagull calls from behind a crenellation. It’s an easy walk, and Andrew snags on why the neighborhood is “Russian Hill” when there’s no incline. Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Noe Valley . . . don’t the names suggest a rolling city? Of course San Francisco has no hills, he thinks. Except in old movies.
Andrew pauses in the middle of the empty street. There are hills in the old movies—in Vertigo, those long, Herrmann-scored driving shots.
He takes out his Wi-Fi glasses. SAN FRANCISCO HILLS: He concentrates on saying the words without saying them. And there were gulls all along the piers, once.
At home, Madeleine lifts groceries out of cloth tote bags set on the kitchen island. “I’m going to attempt a paella,” she announces grandly. There’s no seafood worth eating anymore, but she has the recipe for a chorizo paella. Andrew looks intently at the totes, thinking, Are those our bags? That nagging sense that he’s staring at a clue. The logo of a saucy pig with a chef’s hat and big lashy eyes stares back. Andrew fishes out the delivery receipt and looks for a name, but the receipt is illegible, it looks like a multiple-choice problem off the bar exam.
He asks Madeleine, “Why is there no hill in Russian Hill?”
Madeleine lowers her hands into a bag with her shoulders at her ears, her narrow, birdlike chest caved. She’s disappointed in him, more so every day.
• • •
HE DREAMS, THAT night, of thronging shadowy crowds pushing through narrow streets under a sky that seems impossibly close, like he could knock his head on the sun. He’s looking for his sister, Remedios—calling for her over the heads of people he can’t make out because they’re so close, “Medo! Medo!” He finds her where a depression in a brick wall makes a pocket of space. She’s standing with her face in the corner and when he turns her, her skin is raw, sunburned, blacked with old coal soot. Medo recognizes him breathlessly, dazed, ready to faint. She’s been facing into that wall for days.
• • •
THE ALEPH CORP deposition proceeds at the DOJ branch office on Golden Gate Avenue. Mr. O’Connor grills the chief technology officer on Privacy Mode, specifically how and where the thinking that happens in Privacy Mode gets hidden.
Essentially, the implant tweaks how the hippocampus indexes a memory for recall, so that it’s “lost” to recall outside of Privacy Mode, but retrievable inside it. A memory isn’t like a data file stored in a specific folder on a computer, but a complex web of sensory information and associations that the brain processes in distinct columns of neurons located across the neocortex. “When I remember hugging my daughter in her sunflower dress on her birthday,” the CTO says, showing them the picture in her wallet, “I’m activating a whole ensemble of cortical columns responsible for processing faces, colors, shapes, tactility, body actions, and more abstract associations like time, relations, affection, in order to remember the elements daughter, birthday, hug, sunflower dress. The memory binds these into one episode. The memory trace that lives in the hippocampus is the index to these different cortical columns, or like a map to this ensemble within the brain. When I activate a part of that ensemble—when I see a sunflower, say—it also activates that index, which triggers the rest of the ensemble for recall.” But Privacy Mode, she explains, adds an encryption key to the memory trace so that while Privacy Mode is engaged, the index maps to the correct ensemble, but when it’s not, the index maps to random elements instead. Noise, daydreams, free associations. Within Privacy Mode, the user has access to a whole world of memories, even old memories, that’s walled off from recall otherwise.
“But why?” O’Connor asks. “Why isn’t Privacy Mode designed so it’s just, while you’re in it, the implant stops transmitting anything up to Aleph Corp?”
“Then the data-bundling protocols would scoop up a ‘private’ thought as soon as the user remembered it in normal mode,” says the CTO. “Privacy Mode wouldn’t really be private, then.”
In a corner of the room, the Cincinnati bank executive and his defense attorney take notes. Andrew has trouble hiding his revulsion. The banker is pasty and rumpled, stupid with greed, scared of his own shadow. He stinks of deodorant wearing off. How desperately unhappy do you have to be, Andrew thinks, to pothole your own mind like that?
On the whole, the deposition goes well and Andrew leaves Golden Gate Avenue satisfied with his client’s performance and his own. He’s eager to see the transcript; he takes an undignified pleasure in reading himself. But it’ll be a few more days before the transcript is ready, and meanwhile, the brief on the data subpoena is more important.
It’s only as he turns down Larkin and checks his internal clock that he realizes it’s an hour later than he expected. Andrew runs over the deposition in his head carefully. There’s a foggy, empty patch halfway through—a gap—and he realizes he must have, for some reason, entered Privacy Mode during the deposition.
Andrew squints. He pivots sharply and heads straight toward the nearest BART station.
No litigator in his right mind would make himself forget part of a deposition, that’s just malpractice. But what if his Privacy Mode triggers automatically, on certain cues? If that’s the case, then maybe the old BART tunnels are one of those cues, and that’s why he can never recall his morning commute. And sure enough, as he approaches the BART entrance, his attention slips in odd directions. He hears the ocean, he smells cat litter that needs changing. Not BART—“U” for Under. Andrew focuses; his mind drifts, he re-focuses; he’s working out a thought on the knife’s edge of sleep.
The tunnel entrance is a yawn in the ground, a tongue of stairs. It’s well lit, but it darkens as it descends, the golden light shading to deeper, deader ambers, the steps’ shadows lengthening and sharpening. Beyond, a dark that isn’t dark at all, only a sour colorlessness. Someone jostles Andrew’s shoulder, but he makes out only a smear of violet. Random sensory information, he remembers. Sunflowers. “Sir, do you mind?” Marigolds. Wedding shoes. Pyramid-builders. “U” for Under. “U” for Under, Under, Under.
• • •
“SOMETIMES I WISH I were crazy,” Andrew tells his therapist.
Today her eyes are puffy and red, and she stinks of cigarettes. She says, “When’s the first time you recall wishing that?”
“Law school.” Andrew digs for the memory and he’s relieved to find it largely intact. “I got into Hastings, here in the city, but then it closed, it closed because . . .” He frowns. “That’s not the important part. Berkeley was still open, then, and it took a dozen of us from Hastings, which always made me feel I hadn’t really earned being there. So much pressure and stress—at the time I was working, to send money home to my parents. I’d been going on no sleep, I was so afraid I’d fail all my classes; and one day in class, the prof just nailed me to the wall for coming in unprepared—it was too much—I got up and started walking, down the steps, out of class, under all the dying ginkgo trees, down, down, down the hill. There was this roar of drilling machinery, or—no, they were pumps, in the distance, there were these huge platforms like war machines and networks of pipes and engines, and a droning that filled up my body. I kept walking and thinking, I should have a nervous breakdown, I hope they lock me up, then I won’t fail. How do you like that? That’s what I kept fixating on. If I’m crazy, I don’t have to take the final, and can’t fail.”
