The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  “Aliens do that,” said Diana, nodding her head in false sagacity.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “Go away.”

  —me, always

  God, there’s that woman with the big laugh and the big white face and the big white teeth and the big white hair. I hope she doesn’t see me. I downloaded such a nasty report about her when I first got here. She knew who she was and what it meant to be human and one gender and female and I hated her, every single bit of her.

  I still hate her. I don’t know why. None of the usual reasons. I can’t be forming a family clan in a world like this one, that only does relationships in such a very limited number of directions. And besides, I’ve only met her the once.

  I wrote such a nasty report.

  Oh God, I hope she doesn’t see me.

  The Observer’s Notes

  We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

  —Orson Welles, read online (quotation not verified)

  I remember now. This memory was helped by an unexpected over­night in hospital. This human suit is so damn feeble sometimes.

  I was admitted to a bed within the hour and spent the whole night dozing in between nurses going from bed to bed and taking blood and checking measurements, and how does one ever sleep when one one’s right finger is a measurement device and when one turns one pulls at all the cords and cables from another device?

  I pretended to sleep. Mostly I thought. It was good thinking time. I was able to call forth more of my own memory.

  Nothing personal still. Nothing from before the great adventure to the Planet Earth. But I know so much more about who I am and why I am here.

  No doubt I’ll forget again. Every other time I forget everything. Sometimes I remember just a few things. Each time I remember something new.

  Today’s memory, now, today’s memory is important. I don’t want to forget it. And I remembered where I put my notes, this time, so this time I can write it down. My husband was amused when I asked him to bring my secret diary. He is a good man and when he says he won’t read it, he’ll keep his promise. He has no idea I’m not human. He would sit by me in hospital all night if I let him. I don’t. One of us needs to pretend that life is normal for us to get through this.

  Nothing’s normal. Not my body here in hospital, not my anthro­pological self. I’ve worked out more of the reasons.

  Mindwipe didn’t fully take because I wasn’t prepped for it properly. They spent longer than they should on the physical side. I think it was because the techs were terrified because I was in the public eye, so they were liable for anything that went wrong and they focussed on the perfect body to reflect who I ought to be. I was given the body of an age, at about an age because I had to be close to my real self. It was a few years older than the age the standard anthropologist is given.

  Why the body has so many problems demonstrates how very human they’ve made me, I guess. Unless there’s more I’m still not seeing.

  My real self is critical to my task. Because of their worry, the flaws in the Memories shine through as false, and how they were pulled together matters. I am a rare test of all the stereotypes and public broadcasts and popular culture they drew on for their depiction of an “average” woman.

  And yet I’m not. Not an average woman. Not even an average alien. So much of what is happening is to do with the particular nature of my task and the importance of not giving my identity away.

  I know what this means. Oh God, I’ve just this moment realised. I know precisely what this means. The maths of it is crystal clear. Irrefutable. I’m not an anthropologist.

  The woman’s slow voice...

  was counting again

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, fifty-three.

  I’m not confused. My numbers have known all long what my conscious mind has only now calculated.

  I know what I’m remembering now. It looks as if I can’t count, but this time, the counting means something. I’ve identified the flaw in my Frankenstein mind. I know how old I am. I know what year it is.

  This is where remembering my memories doesn’t work at all. It makes everything worse. So much worse. It’s when I begin to know Memories as well as memories.

  I need to retain my self-awareness the whole time, remember more, be able to interrogate myself. I need to understand what’s happening. More than anything, I need to move on. I need to.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  It’s a mess. The whole thing is a mess.

  I say this every time I reach this point in the notes. Diana’s intuition was spot on. She knew what was wrong before she had words for it. And yet we didn’t notice. All your observations were of a different species (well, they were, let’s be honest) and of a troublesome member of a different species. Diana’s politics entered into the equation.

  Every time I check her records, I think that the problem was caused by us. Not our many-gendered cousins. Not humans. Us.

  I’m writing it down this time because it needs noting. I know this is an impossible outcome. I know I cannot make recommendations that remove us from all work to do with other planets. I am not stupid.

  This is a note. Nothing more. It is not a recommendation. Not an outcome.

  The woman’s slow voice...

  was counting again

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, fifty-three, forty-four.

  This is when it happened.

  This is when I started knowing, deep inside, that my Memories were artificial. That there was no school bus. That there was no school. That I never married the first time. That I didn’t read Anne of Green Gables. That my whole life was invented by a group of techs who worked on averages and knew nothing about humans. Even average humans are not a composite of averages, and yet they expected me to be that and to remain myself. They failed. I failed.

  And I remember.

  None of this is good.

  The Observer’s Notes

  Remove one letter and you go from bothering someone to othering them.

  —said by a friend

  I should talk about sex. I really should. Sex should fill my diary because it fills human culture. Even if no-one has it, their social norms push it, glamorise it, hate it. It’s as if the pushy, hormone-filled period of their lives (and they don’t have four of them, like we do) dominates their shared landscapes.

  One of the reasons my small group of friends is so safe is because we have clear parameters for talking about sex.

  Mostly it’s a matter of paying attention to everyone’s comfort zones. Some days one needs to exclaim or mourn or analyse or tempest. Other days it’s all about the emotions. And when two (possibly three) of us are in difficult places in terms of sexual relations, it’s important to observe each other’s needs. We learned early on that our assumptions about each other were false, and we’ve learned to respect each other’s actual lives rather than the way we all appear in public. It wasn’t easy for me, but Antoinette and Trina led the way in finding ways we could talk safel
y. Honestly. Without turning each other into porn.

  My friends have taught me so much about the roles sex narratives play in different groups, I find. It’s not that they’re subversive or that they intentionally transgress those roles, it’s that the sex narratives are seldom easily applicable to middle-aged women. And we all know it. One of the reasons we have to be so aware of each other is because we are fumbling, trying to find equivalent narratives that work for us and would still be acceptable in wider society.

  This helps me in so many ways. It helps with my work, it helps me navigate my human life. And it helps me handle the techs.

  I won’t write too much about the tech view of the sex act here (never the stories, never the relationships—only ever the sex act), though, because it’ll fix the subject of the sex act itself in my mind too clearly, and I have to keep this part of my life out of the technicians’ reach. That’s what I mean when I talk about handling.

  This is not because it’s the proper thing to do. In fact, keeping my mind clear is entirely improper. I’m supposed to have my mind stuffed with everything human, ready to report in. The thing is, because I retain so much of myself between the three-month visits, the readjustment period is…different for me.

  When it all began, I’d walk through the green arc. I’d sit down at a chair in the waiting room and chat with other anthropologists as my memory returned. We’d be called one by one for download. We’d strip for download, lie on the flat bed, and the bed would move us backwards until our head was in the machine’s ambit. A set of questions would be posed and we would respond silently. The questions were triggers, I think, or I’m not remembering everything about it yet. Or I’ve remembered and forgotten again, which is something I now suspect might happen.

  After the questions, we would be given a time for verbal reports. This is why we’re encouraged to write the way I’m doing now—it makes formulation of our reports for download a lot more efficient. And that was that. After download, we’d leave by the arc door and that was that, too.

  When we swapped notes before each session, we were all surprised by how long the download took. Many were dehydrated and hungry at the end, which made sense, considering the slow download and how very long it took. Some of us were more efficient than others—my download has never taken more than a half day, and is usually much shorter. Or maybe, in light of what I know now, I was never asked the same questions.

  Now I’m more aware, the sequence is quite different, subjectively.

  I enter through the arc. The room I am in is not the room I used to find myself in. In fact, it’s a small white space where the voices of the techs are clear and loud and paying more attention to their data input than to me. It’s the Earthside backup room for most of the equipment, and it would be possible to operate the download and communicate from here, if one had to. I guess I could call it a machine room. Sounds better than “the little white room”, at least. The techs don’t talk to me directly while I’m in the machine room. Nor do they monitor my facial expressions or body language. I suspect that anything short of me standing up and doing a jig while screaming abuse won’t catch their attention.

  They check the equipment from their safe distance and monitor the levels of particular whatevers in my blood, and all the rest of the time they chat about me, about Earth, about how it’s good my people take on the brunt of Earth activity because it sucks. Oh, and they gossip.

  That’s pretty much it. This room is the timesink. Download itself only takes around twenty minutes. I drink from my water bottle while I’m in this room. It makes a difference.

  When the light in the room changes from white to green, I stand up (automatically; I doubt if I could stop this action even if I wanted), walk through a perfectly ordinary door, and then sit down in the usual waiting room.

  The chatter I’ve overheard in the white cell has helped explain quite a lot.

  One of the more disconcerting pieces of random information that has come my way is additional uses the techs have for my data. Once every three months, when they check that my Memories are intact (and such a fine job they do of that), and that my body is stable and they take my official report and send it home. Also, once every three months they use me as a source of erotica.

  They use all of us. Some of the real anthropologists are actually their personal porn stars. They have developed quite a following back home. I wouldn’t be them in a thousand worlds. Imagine reaching home after all that sacrifice, after all that time, and finding that one’s data collection is less important than one’s sex acts.

  I would become a porn object, if I gave them any data. I am far too well known back home. It would ruin my reputation, my family clan, everything.

  This isn’t good from a personal point of view, but it’s quite shocking when one considers that we’re supposed to be understanding humans, not exploiting them. Sex is recorded, oh yes it is. And it is sold. Humans are just exotic enough for the premiums to be high, for enough of their emotions and social habits align with our own for them to be understandable. That’s why we’re all here, because the “friendly aliens” are the ones that most need understanding. Not the kind of understanding the techs bring, however. That’s simply unethical.

  I rebel by giving what the techs ask, literally, without much in the way of visualisation and re-experiencing. I also go out of my way to avoid sexual encounters outside the home. This is possibly also due to me having entered into an asexual gender when I was converted to humanity.

  They’re not interested in my home life at all, and don’t even realise that my sex life is part of it. Thank goodness for this particular significant difference between my two species. My relations with my Earth husband are mine. Ours. Not theirs.

  I tell them I was asexual when converted, however, every time, and they nod and move on to the real report quite quickly. That’s not true, though. I was in an entirely different mode, one which has no equivalent on Earth: my body both then and now is not any less sexual than most. With the strange regendering of menopause dominating every moment, it is definitely sexual. They’ve never questioned me on the lie. I don’t think they care.

  I lie because I don’t want to parade. I don’t want to be the subject of titillation. I know what happens to the erotica and the porn and the funny incidents. Mass entertainment.

  This is another of the things I’m not supposed to know, not supposed to remember. I’m not meant to remember that we’re a race of voyeurs whose anthropology is fucked to hell. I’m also not supposed to remember that my very first public claim to fame was as a crusader against this exploitation. Every time I remember this about myself, I fear I am shocked. I hate forgetting and, equally, I hate remembering.

  I thought about the sequence, last time, on my way home. Everyone remembers a little in the waiting room, when our blocks are removed. That’s when we chat and compare notes. A short time of being whole people. Or at least having wholeness within sight.

  We see ourselves from the outside, when those blocks are removed. We’re visitors to this world and our bodies are not our own, and when those blocks are gone we can share everything as if it were part of one of those interactive stories. At that moment, we become voyeurs of our own carefully arranged existences. We laugh together at the irony of me downloading my sexual exploits. Me, the reformer.

  Except I neither download them, nor do I have that vast gap between myself and my other self, inside and outside the facility. I pretend. Moving the blocks does nothing. Sometimes they are in place and I act more human, but almost always I have a slight sense of who I am. Even when I don’t know the whole (which, to be honest, is most of the time), I have something more than the others, who only have that small time in the waiting room.

  This is why, when I am sufficiently self-aware, I write myself these notes. They may not be consistent, or thorough, but they’re all I have. I have an official excuse for them, and it’s
one that will stick with me when the memory runs away. It makes me less miserable: I want my feelings and realisations to be documented whenever they can be, not once every three months. I want the everyday record to be balanced with something just a trifle more sane.

  How the hell did I get this way? Others are different, but why am I so fucking different? It means that—even when I’m chatting with my co-workers and comparing notes and remarking on the stupidity of humans—it means that, even then I’m entirely alone.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “We have an apple-not-falling-far-enough-from-the-tree situation.”

  “You mean his mother did this too?”

  “There is no cure.”

  —overheard at a bus stop

  I’m not sure I’ll ever work out Christmas. There’s too much false information running interference.

  I have Memories of Christmas Past. I always think this in capitals because I think the devisers-of-fake-human-memory couldn’t work out Christmas either. Much of my Christmas Memory is a pastiche of perfect moments stolen mostly from an overly-cheerful television advertisement. Not merely one advertisement. A whole series of carefully devised perfect moments. Perfect down to the glossy smiles and red-brick fireplace, big enough for a Santa Claus. It’s interesting how I accepted it as real for so long. How our minds process something missing three of the senses and pretend that it’s enough. Half of my Memories are my mind pretending that the memories are enough. It turns black-and-white into colour. It adds flavour and smell and feel.

  It’s like looking back over an old photograph album that belongs to someone else, and claiming it all. For Christmas I’ve claimed every gleaming grin, every smile, every scrap of wrapping paper and all the gifts. Or…