Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Read online

  In the bathroom, she combed back her hair and let it fall over her shoulders. She studied her reflection, pleasantly surprised by what she saw. The smart-mirror flashed a quick “GOOD MORNING.” Then the default presets loaded unobtrusively along the side and bottom: the weather forecast—cloudy, fifty-six, seventy percent chance of rain after 6 p.m.—stock reports, and a news ticker accompanied by a talking head who delivered the top news stories. Mesa turned on the water faucet, and the sink’s biometrics measured her temperature and pulse rate. The data presented itself on the bottom-right corner of the mirror, next to a pulsating, bright-red heart icon. It told her she was in excellent health for a woman in her early twenties.

  Emotionally and mentally, she had reached her baseline of normalcy, and she felt surprisingly good. Her earlier breakdown after the high was fading, clouded over by the memories of better feelings. A fullness had engulfed her and made her content. The only thing missing was coffee.

  The door of the flat opened with a protesting squeal. The noise was enough to wake Jonah from his stupor. Mesa met his frown with an apologetic smile.

  “I was getting worried,” he said, pushing himself into a seated position on the sofa. “You didn’t call.”

  Mesa felt her cheeks flush with guilt. “I’m sorry. I got wrapped up in my night out.”

  “You know I worry about you, right?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You need to be careful out there.”

  “I know. I said I’m sorry.” She talked over her shoulder, moving into the kitchen, both hands wrapped around a cup of Morning Java blend.

  “You need to call me when you’re going to be out all night.”

  “Look,” she said, “I told you I’m sorry. Move on.”

  She tossed the plastic lid in the recycler then took a deep breath of the coffee’s aroma, letting the steam warm her face.

  “I needed a night out. That’s all. Needed to have some fun.” She sat next to him, tucking her legs beneath herself.

  “I get that,” he said. His hunt for the next words was plainly difficult.

  Mesa’s therapist had suggested they learn better communication skills and encouraged them to be open with one another. Open lines of communication would be difficult for both of them, the doctor had said, but being honest about their feelings and speaking freely without worry of judgment was necessary. Jonah had taken the message to heart. Still, it never came easy. He was a buttoned-up sort.

  “It’s just that… before, I mean. You used to disappear a lot. You’d come and go whenever you wanted, and I don’t want you to feel like a prisoner, but—God, am I making any sense?”

  She rubbed his back with the palm of her hand and gave him a quick peck on the forehead. “It’s cool, Dad. I get it. I screwed up.”

  On the coffee table were curled e-papers. Jonah’s drafting pencil had rolled to the floor. She recognized the woman emerging from the thin lines and rough markings. The prominent cheekbones were defined with light shadows. Mesa knew her mother’s face only from her father’s drawings and the rare mem recording she kept in her bedroom.

  She took a deep breath then continued. “I wasn’t thinking about you. I was focusing on myself.”

  “You should be able to do that, though. You deserve your own space, time to yourself, whatever. Call next time, OK?”

  She gave him another quick peck then pushed herself up. “I need to study.”

  “You’re doing great, you know.”

  She beamed. “It feels like it. I think I’m finding my groove.”

  A smattering of data chips were splayed across the desktop in her bedroom, along with empty coffee cups, which she dumped into a small trashcan. Her clubbing outfit went into a hamper filled with the last few days’ worth of pending laundry.

  She fished the DRMR pad from a desk drawer and uncoiled the thin black cable. She scooped back her hair behind her ear and plugged the male end of the cord into the port that lay flush with her skin. An electronic chill bloomed inside her as the devices in her skull mated with the peripheral device and queued up the menu. The display came alive, splayed across her retinas. She gave the play button a mental tap, and the data began synchronizing with the installed REMINDER software.

  Developed by DARPA to help brain-damaged soldiers recover from trauma, REMIND mimicked the hippocampus and aided long-term memory storage. DRMR, an earlier DARPA invention that had expanded into the civilian market, relied heavily on the hippocampus. Because that segment of her brain was severely damaged, DRMR was largely useless. However, with the addition of the REMIND prosthetics and some rewiring, her DRMR became a natural delivery system for the REMINDER protocols.

  Three years earlier, she had been abducted and suffered severe trauma at the hands of a madwoman, Alice Xie. Mesa had woken in a hospital with no memory, no identity. A stranger had been beside her. Her father. He’d done everything he could to help, but any hope of recovering her lost past had vanished. Her life prior to that reawakening was gone forever.

  She’d relearned many of the skills she had once had through a series of progressively difficult learning modules. With the REMINDER downloads came homework—lots of it.

  The last three years had been grueling but progressive. Mesa was a quick learner, and her degree of determination, commitment, and achievement astounded her doctors and private tutors.

  Her tutors believed that in another year, she would be able to pass the GED and start hunting for colleges. She wasn’t sure what she would study, and she rarely thought about that aspect of her future. Although she couldn’t remember her past, the void of things forgotten clung to her like a shawl. She was more interested in unearthing her previous life and learning more about her own history than worrying about what might become of tomorrow.

  By the time the first tutorial was finished, her coffee was cool. Still, the acidic bitterness set off a spark of pleasure. She shut her eyes briefly, smiling to herself. She interrupted the dataflow and dislodged the chip before hunting through the rest scattered on the desktop.

  She swiveled the chair around, propped her feet up on the edge of the bed, and leaned back. Mesa plugged in a new chip and let a scrap of the unremembered past wash over her.

  Mesa was two years old, running barefoot through the grass. She wore purple pants and a T-shirt with a big yellow flower on it, her full belly poking out beneath the fabric. Her face was chubby, and she was constantly laughing. A smile stretched so widely across her face that her cheeks nearly pushed shut her eyes. Large and black, those almond-shaped eyes tilted upward, the clearest mark of her Japanese heritage from her mother.

  Her laugh was infectious. She clung to Selene’s index fingers as she and Mesa twirled around the lawn. A slight breeze ruffled their long black hair.

  “Ashes, ashes,” Selene sang.

  Mesa’s laugh built into excited shrieks. Her head tilted back toward the sun as she spun. Her favorite part was coming up.

  “We all fall down!”

  Mesa let go of Selene’s fingers and flung herself back, squealing as she fell. She gyrated on the lawn, kicking her arms and legs in the air, laughing and laughing. Then Selene was on top of her, tickling her ribs and grabbing playfully at Mesa’s little feet, her fingers drawing more excited bouts of laughter from the child as they drew across her soles. Mesa was laughing hard, out of breath, her cheeks rosy. She stuck her tongue out between her tiny, perfect teeth.

  “Ashes,” Mesa said, the word too large for her mouth. “Fall down!” she shouted, rolling about in the grass, grabbing clumps of green in her tiny fist.

  In her bedroom, Mesa could feel the heat of the remembered sunlight warming her. A flush of joy bloomed deep in her core, imitating the original. The memory wasn’t hers, nor was it Selene’s. The memory belonged to Jonah. He’d given Mesa a
bag of these chips—his collection of memories from her childhood. Cherished recollections. He’d lain in the grass that day, watching his wife and daughter enjoy a perfect moment, and more than twenty years later, he’d shared that moment with his daughter, who had no recollection of him or herself. Although Selene had died years before Mesa’s problems, the woman’s affection for Mesa’s youthful counterpart had endeared her greatly. Her mother’s love swam across the ages to her, and Mesa wished for some way to thank her.

  A few dozen more memories littered the desk and its drawers. Even more were scattered across the web, archived in deeply buried caches of sites such as MemSpace and Episodic. She’d found a few, posted by Selene more than a decade ago, but the search hadn’t been easy. More were out there, she knew. There had to be.

  She finished the coffee and unplugged, calling it quits for the day. She felt antsy and confined, stricken with a hard-core case of cabin fever.

  “I need to take a walk, get out and stretch for a bit,” she said.

  Still dressed in Kaizhou’s clothes, she said goodbye to Jonah and promised to call, but she didn’t think she would be out late.

  Even as the door closed behind her, she wondered how it would be to leave and never come back. To disappear. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the errant thought. But she knew how much irreparable pain that would cause Jonah, and as she had before, she dismissed the idea before it could fully form. Even though her psychiatrist suggested keeping an open line of dialogue with her father and sharing her thoughts and feelings with him, she kept that secret to herself.

  That and one other.

  Chapter 2

  Coffee was the lifeblood of a memorialist, Mesa thought.

  Time was fleeting, and sleep took up too much. Hence, caffeine.

  Jonah would have gone batshit had he known. Thinking of sharing her thoughts with her father, Mesa had asked him about memorialists once. Instead, she’d gotten a lecture on how they were a cult of crazies who cooped themselves up in basements and overloaded their brains with other people’s lives instead of having lives of their own. She’d learned this was a common stereotype, and she rarely spoke of her activities to non-memorialists. She held the secret close, maintaining a private world she could escape to.

  The movement had its share of critics who denigrated the memorialists, calling them nothing more than memory addicts. The accusation, while not necessarily untrue, always carried a heavy weight of condemnation.

  There were memory whores who joined up simply to ride the DRMR-amplified highs. They got off on the voyeuristic aspects of others’ sexual experiences or the by-proxy euphoria of drug use. Others, including Jonah, thought memorialists were simply another brand of religious zealots.

  Many tried to find God in the memories of the masses. They believed God was in the details and his invisible hand guided each interaction, rolling the dice on every occurrence. The God seekers thought that somewhere, deep within these associations, sparking to life in the unseen chemical reactions of memory, was the key to unlocking the mystery of his existence. Mesa, a skeptic, considered that to be nonsense. DRMR was a powerful tool, and the brain was a bioelectric machine built through millennia of evolution. Science had advanced to the point where it allowed mankind to not only record these electro-chemical reactions but also replicate them exactly in the minds of others. That ability was a staggering achievement. Those replicative powers interested Mesa the most.

  Kaizhou was one of the few who knew Mesa’s history as intimately as she did. He knew of the chemical assault against her brain by Alice Xie—the attack three years prior had left her mind a blank slate—and her on-going efforts toward recovery. He’d tutored her in the more difficult math assignments. Then eventually, their slow affair had grown into something more, and he’d worried about a conflict of interest. Somewhere along the way, he’d admitted to being a memorialist and suggested she try it. Despite her reluctance, the idea had taken root and grown into a quiet certitude.

  Joining his group had been a means to an end that gave her a particular standing among her fellow memory hounds. She was an aberration because much of her mind was a void. The others had greeted Mesa with awe then respect and a shared common interest. They helped navigate the memory caches and built a convergence web around her.

  Constructing the web was slow. Jonah’s mem chips provided focal data points, as well as points of reference to expand upon. Selene had become another reference point, a fragmentary construct built from Jonah’s experiences. Mesa’s mother had been active on various social networks, but digging deep enough to recover pertinent information from the historical layers was grueling. New data constantly buried older information deeper and deeper.

  When Mesa arrived at the coffee shop, Jade and Kaizhou were already there. She’d hit them both up over the commNet and asked if everyone was still meeting. Ashita, Sri, Rameez, and Doris were there, too, plugged in and carrying the blank stares of an engaged DRMR, caffeine at the ready. Other than their group and the PetHuman server bots, the cafe was largely empty.

  “Where’s your boy toy?” Mesa asked.

  Jade let out a noise and made a jerk-off motion. “He was a tosser. Had a thing for feet. No thank you.”

  “How was the concert?” Ashita asked.

  “It was amazing,” Kaizhou said, beaming. Kaizhou was Aki’s biggest fanboy. His music populated an enormous amount of data sectors in Kaizhou’s head, to the point that Mesa had once told him she was worried it would spill over and corrupt his actual memory banks. He was a purist, though, and felt the risk was worth it. Aside from a live, bi-fi-fed performance, the native digital releases were the best way to experience Aki’s scriptures. And that was how obsessed Kaizhou was; he never called it music, always scripture.

  “I’m sorry we missed it,” Sri said, her arm slung around Ashita’s shoulders, leaning into the woman.

  “What were you doing, Rameez?” Jade asked. “Saving the whales or some such?”

  Rameez frowned, which only served to make Jade laugh. The Pakistani gent had a deep affection for marine life, which Mesa appreciated, but Jade never understood it.

  “Hey,” Kaizhou said, holding a data tablet toward Mesa, “I got you something.”

  Mesa looked at him expectantly, practically tearing the pad out of his hand. She plugged in before he could even tell her what it was.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. The clip was short, the briefest of instances, and she replayed it.

  She recognized the Japanese woman with long black hair. Selene was sitting on concrete steps, with Jonah beside her. Mesa was four or five, eating popcorn.

  She slowed the playback, trying to absorb the details. Selene was in mid-laugh, and Jonah was smiling. Mesa was turning back to watch them, her small hand raising a large chunk of caramel popcorn to her lips. Her black hair stuck out in stubby pigtails on either side of her head.

  Whoever had recorded the scene was in a hurry, walking fast. His head darted around as he weaved through pedestrian traffic. The mem was nothing more than a quick glimpse of her family, but it was enough.

  She played it again.

  She wrapped her arms around Kaizhou and kissed him. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “It’s not much,” he said.

  Mesa unplugged, handing the tablet back to him. “It’s more than I had before. It’s another piece, another connection.”

  “Does it help at all?” Jade asked. “I mean, do you ever remember anything?”

  “No,” Mesa said. “But I don’t expect to.” I only hope I will, she didn’t add.

  Rameez shifted his bulk, turning to face Kaizhou. His eyes were large. “Have you seen the newsfeeds?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  “Seven memorialists were killed in Los Angeles. Police think it was the whole sect. News is calling it a m
assacre.”

  “Holy shit.” Jade straightened up, curling her long fingers around her white paper cup.

  News out of LA was rare following the PRC takeover and the cease-fire, unless the story was sensational or gory, preferably both. PacRim military kept a tight filter over the government-run news services. Mesa quickly realized that the news had originated from local citizen sources and filtered out of California by way of pirated newsfeeds across the hacker satellites.

  “PRC is keeping mum, but some anonymous police sources are confirming the story to legitimate outside news agencies,” Jade said, scrolling through the feeds on her tablets.

  “Any idea who’s responsible?” Kaizhou asked.

  “Nothing concrete, but lots of speculation to pick from. Either some of God’s warriors”—her voice dripped with derision—“or some psycho off his meds.”

  “This is crazy,” Doris said, his Greek accent thick, his eyes downcast and somber.

  “And it’s also an isolated event,” Kaizhou said. “It sucks, but there’s no need to panic.”

  He met Rameez’s worried eyes and waited for his friend to absorb his words. Finally, Rameez nodded, and his face cleared. Doris also seemed to have taken the words to heart.

  “Keep an eye on the forums,” Mesa said. “If anybody made it out of there, they could reach out for help.”

  “I’ll keep Somnambulist up and running and refreshing for news. There’s already a lot of posts coming in,” Rameez said.

  Somnambulist was a private memorialist forum, and users were scrutinized at registration prior to being allowed access. Hierarchy was based on the amount of interaction and number of posts. Lurkers were monitored and allowed access to more basic, generalized postings, while the regular users were granted unrestricted privileges but were still a level below the mods who supervised for compliance to the site rules.