The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  I know what it is.

  It’s buying a house. An old house. A big house. That house has portraits of dignified men and women with high hair and higher lineage. And these ancestors become your ancestors. Bought by the yard along with the house. You walk up and down and up and down the corridor and the big hall, working out who they are and how they belong to you. Humans used to do this, you know, buy ancestors by the yard. They weren’t really buying ancestors (Why do I have to explain this?), but portraits which they claimed were of relatives. Humans tell stories—this means they will lie. The more human I am, the easier it is to tell stories.

  You buy yourself a long wall full of ancestors. “That’s Uncle Fred,” you tell yourself. “He’s silent.” In all his life he only said fifty words. Most conversations with him were nods and grunts and “Thank you.” He was unfailingly polite in his silence. He was the uncle who fixed your broken toys and kept you company when your heart was first broken. Fifteen, you were. You and Uncle Fred sat over there, by the fire, every afternoon and every evening all that winter. The nights and mornings you spent in bed, blaming yourself for the horror of your life.

  The trouble with photo-album memories is that Uncle Fred in the portrait is a dapper, early nineteenth-century gentleman, and you could not possibly have known him unless you were blessed with some kind of eternal life.

  I discovered this problem with my Memories the hard way. It hurt more than anything else I’d experienced.

  It was probably my first genuine experience in the whole of my human existence.

  One of my memories, I found out, had been stolen from a Judy Garland movie.

  I discovered Judy Garland by happenstance, two days after I first realised that I was self-aware. I was two days alive in my new life and already had to face that my personal history was faked. Not even well-faked.

  One of my Christmas Memories was stolen from a Judy Garland movie. This is another of those things that I say over and over, as if repeating it would calm the emotions it still gives to me. My blood boils every time I think of it.

  My iconic Christmas tree, the one I remember from my tenth birth­day as “the best Christmas tree ever” had green and red trimmings and baubles and, branch for branch, bauble for bauble was precisely the one in Meet Me in Saint Louis. This shocked me so very much that I started chasing down other aspects of my Christmas memory. More than one came from a home improvement advertisement. This is the one that came to define my Christmas as being derived from advertisements.

  These Memories were just taken, as they were, from these places. Not even cleverly faked.

  There is no chance at living a real life if one’s experiences are stolen from home improvement advertisements. Whenever I’m tempted to hide from my reality, I play the soundtrack to that Judy Garland movie. I’d watch the movie, but seeing the tree makes me vomit.

  Christmas is one of the reasons I’ve never reported any of this to my controllers. I feel a deep and abiding betrayal. Besides…

  I’m supposed to report the loss of my conditioning. That’s a perfectly clear guideline, in theory. Except that I never really lost anything. The Memories are still there. I simply know they’re false. I’m self-aware in a way I probably ought not be, but I don’t have enough of myself to replace Judy Garland.

  Something in me announced at a point, very quietly, “That’s your excuse. You don’t have to report to anyone except yourself. Write things down. You’ve got guidelines for this, too.” They’re infallible guidelines. Keeping a journal has been programmed in with the memories. I took the safe route.

  One of my major concerns is: How can an anthropologist analyse a culture from within it when they possess such badly faked memories? When they possess faked memories at all? It seems an appalling method to me. It also seems cruel.

  Maybe it’s not just Christmas I can’t work out.

  Maybe there’s something about me that’s unexpected.

  Maybe my Memories have only now begun to break down and there’s more interesting experience in store for me.

  Maybe…I’m supposed to be someone else entirely.

  I’m pretty sure I’m still an anthropologist, although I would need to read my previous entries to be certain, for I still lose and regain chunks of myself each time I walk through the arc. I can’t imagine what I’d be doing on this planet if not studying humans. I really might have had more memory on an earlier occasion—I will have to re-read all my notes someday, and put it all together and make my everyday memory more solid. I’d rather have external knowledge right now, though. I feel as if I’m walking on loose sand and the tide’s coming in.

  I wish I could talk to other agents and find out more. The idea is to get to know humanity, however, and I couldn’t spot one of my fellows if you paid me. Even the ones I must meet from time to time.

  Now, that’s another very human concept, that “if you paid me”. The notion of monetary reward leading to improved work. Time after time it leads to corruption and unstable societies.

  Daft, all these notions. Daftest of all is Christmas. Not just Christmas, but Judy Garland’s Christmas. The daftness is at our end, though, not Earth’s. Why did the techs short-change the research? What persuaded them to do such a job? Is it just me, or is our system disintegrating? Or is it both, me being targeted due to a system that’s lousy?

  I need to explore this.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  Her body is too damn feeble. Of all the motifs that repeat and repeat in the reports, her body is closest to those daisies. It looks bright and impenetrably full of cheer and as if it will last forever, but then it is dropped and crushed underfoot and becomes a stained and pained mess, or it wilts and can never be itself again.

  Do you know how much work that body takes to keep it going? I’m speaking in the present tense because I’m looking at hospital records, and they make me testy. Time after time it happens. Not always this sequence, but something like it. Humans have to make up for our deficiencies. It’s an artificial body, built for the purpose; it shouldn’t have these flaws.

  She is taken to hospital by ambulance because they thought she was having a heart attack. She isn’t. I heave a sigh of relief. She’s sent home the next day with a clean bill of health. Then the hospital rings her. It RINGS her. And a doctor says: “We missed one of the blood samples. You need to come back in case you have a blood clot in your lungs.” She doesn’t. She has a lump somewhere else that could be cancerous.

  That’s just one event. One of three in one year. One of far too many over her human lifetime.

  This is the evidence I was hoping not to find. This is proof that she was manipulated into doing one of the vilest jobs imaginable and not given the tools to do the job. Somebody or somebodies wanted to get rid of her, and would be quite happy if she took a planet with her.

  She was a well-known reformist in her time. Effective, not just argumentative. A dynamic change agent.

  But that’s not all. Personal vendettas should never, ever lead to genocide.

  Riddling her body with imperfections so that she has to fight every day to stay alive rather than spending the same effort on making a sincere Judgement… That’s going in my report. I’m taking the cautious option for the report, too, for I don’t want to find myself caught by the same type of people. If one can call them people. Slobs and sons of slobs. All my work will stay in English until the final presentation, which will be done in public, with aplomb. I shall use one of our most curious traditions—that of honouring the peoples studied—to save my own skin. And I shall encrypt it.

  I’ve already opened files on other planets destroyed by Judgements that are potentially fallible, and I’ve sent them out to reliable bureaucrats. Even if none of them are not quite half as problematic as Earth, I’ve opened a huge can of worms. I was sent here to validate a related can
of worms, but not one as big as the one I found when I got all the data.

  I fear for us, the way Diana felt for Earth. She had to make a decision regardless, and so do I. I thought my stakes were low and hers were impossibly high. Now it seems I might be fated to follow her.

  I do not believe in fate. I shall defeat this group of niggles, using caution and subtlety.

  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, forty-five.

  This is not my place.

  I do not belong.

  Never. I’ve never belonged. I always knew this somewhere deep. Now the whole of me knows it. Even my conscious self.

  I expect I should find out why I don’t belong. I don’t want to. I want to wallow in misery first. It’s a genuine emotion, after all, and much more interesting and real than the false feelings attached to stupid Memories. I want real feelings, real experience, a real life. I need to find myself. That self is messed in a morass of Memories.

  I must unmess it.

  I need to wallow. Ranting and raging and whingeing aren’t luxuries. They’re the only real thing I possess.

  My Earthname is Diana. My fakename. My improvised human name. The one I live with, for want of a better. I remember this now, and I remembered not so long ago that I was not from Earth, but I did not remember the way I was, nor did I know my real name.

  I still don’t know my real name.

  My name is part of who I am. It has been denied me. This makes me red-hot with rage. Hot flushes. I have an excuse for them. Yet they are not always the hormones reminding me of my many-gendered past. Now they can also be a fast-burning rage at what has been done to me.

  I’ve had near-memories of my existence before the lies began for all my time on Earth. I interpreted my early life through symbols. Yellow hats, the stairs on a bus: these were remnants from my real childhood. This was my memory peeking through the bleakness of loss. Early flowers at the end of the harsh winter.

  At this moment, all I have are those early blossoms and my name. I get a memory back, then I lose everything but the memory of the memory. I fear that there will never be a full blooming, and I will never rejoice in the fullness and complexity of my existence. I began to know when I was forty-four. Or was it fifty-three? It’s hard to count when time has been restructured. I still don’t know everything I should. There has been a dreadful error, and some of me was lost in the voyage from the stars.

  I am so very angry.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “x+1=x”

  —me, just today

  Being an observer makes me patient. I watch, I listen. I pay vast attention. My eyes saucer.

  I like to trap all the understanding I do not feel. I am the Margaret Mead of anthropologists and I understand everything from an elevated viewpoint as a learned observer. I sip the hot chocolate of friendship and pretend I have a place. In my day job, I merely observe: I do not pretend to belong there.

  When I stop to think, my careful anthropological superiority collapses. I haven’t read Margaret Mead. I know this because my Memory of Mead is fractalled. It’s not patchy at all. It’s mathematical. I can chase mentions of her into smaller and smaller patterns and they’re all x+1=x.

  I deduced that fractalling is how my Memories are structured, and that the fractals give me the sense that Memories are founded on deep realities and on actual experience. The fractalling makes the memories echo like real ones, I guess. Except that I can calculate a formula from it. The formula is terribly, terribly obvious the moment I start thinking about it.

  Real life memories are seldom predictably formulaic. I find myself comparing, chasing before and after and comparing them. Take a picture and then fractal it in a mind and one has instant Memory. It’s more solid than simply layering half-truths, because of that echo. It’s no less false.

  Each time I unravel an aspect of the fractal, the only Memories that remain solid are the ones where real emotions are tugged behind them in their wake. This hurts beyond anything.

  I lost a child. This really happened. Not the child I remember losing, but my own, real infant with its claws and its yellow infant frills. That hurt remains. The memory of my child is gone forever: I have no joy to balance the damage.

  This is a very cruel method of creating human memories. We really don’t like our anthropologists, do we? Or humans. I’m pretty sure we only like humans for the potential smut.

  Anthropologists, now, we play with their hearts in order to create minds suitable for exploring strange cultures. This is hurt beyond any ethical boundaries, for there is no chance of healing from something where the ache is left but none of the memory.

  “You must know Margaret Mead,” these fools tell me, “because you’re an anthropologist.” Every debriefing they say this. To the 190,000th fractal I have this message. They’ve said it so often it’s encoded deep within my mind. I must know Mead. At no stage does this message break down, and yet I don’t know how I know Margaret Mead, nor what my understanding of her entails. It isn’t my understanding of Margaret Mead, for I have none. I have never had any.

  I was sitting in on a card game last night, with my saucer-eyes. Glued to the chair, I analysed the politics. That was why I was there, I’ve deduced. After an event I can find out what I was doing there: this is how I discover other parts of my programming. I also unravel that programming, just as I unravel my Memories through following the fractals. I do not trust the techs. I trust four people on this planet and none on any other.

  The card players thought I was waiting for them to finish so that we could get coffee, but that was merely an excuse. I was watching to see how the personal element of the game played out.

  Two of the players formed an alliance. One of the players was the mother of half the alliance and the play against her was extreme. The emotions humans show towards their mothers are complex and interesting.

  Then someone changed the rules and the game changed in its entirety. I found myself thinking, about the change in rules: “Can we humans do these things?” It worried me that I thought of myself as human. It disrupted my work and so I stopped analysing the politics.

  Techs must take our memory so that we are not distracted by such thoughts. This is the theory. At least, I expect this is the theory. They take our theory as well. Our whole education is replaced by fractals.

  I want to think of that card game as a kaleidoscope, where rotating a tube gives a different view. Except…except…that implies a more static set of components than there ought to be. And it implies that I was a neutral observer. I was supposed to be a neutral observer, but I wasn’t one. This is another element of humanity that the techs have never understood. I was part of the game, even though I held no cards.

  In human narratives, everyone plays a part. Even the people the narrative itself pretends to exclude.

  Humanity doesn’t allow neutral observers. It lies to itself about this, and uses those lies to reinforce hierarchies or to set down boundaries, but everyone is part of human narratives.

  Outsiders also participate, in their way. An outsider may bring drinks, give a running commentary, disconcert the player with their silence: they have many choices. This is because humans don’t play card games: they tell stories. The card game is part of a story and that story includes me. Humans don’t create fractals, either.

  Humans are utterly alien.

  This set me to worrying. If my Margaret Mead Memory was set up so ver
y clearly to be false, then what is the way I’m supposed to observe? Why can I see the fractals and calculate my Memory? If I’m not an anthropologist, why am I here?

  If this were a story containing card game manoeuvres, I’d be a human with an alien overwipe. I would find my true self and rediscover my life.

  My mind is fractals and symbols when I go deep. It’s not stories. I don’t think that I’m a human masquerading as an alien in a human body.

  I am alien. I don’t know who I am, or why I’m here, but I know what I am.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  Today the friends focussed on Leanne. She needed it.

  Sometimes, when one is a reformer, the world becomes too big. And everything hurt. She needed to tell them about it.

  She started with that simple refusal. “I’m not used to accepting ‘no’,” she explained. “I’m fine with all of you. I’ll push back a bit just to test, but if you’re behind your feelings, I’ll accept them. I won’t agree, but I’ll leave it to you to make your own decisions and to run your own life. That’s what friends do. When I’m proven to be right and everything falls to pieces, I’ll help pick up those pieces and put them together again. When I’m wrong, I’ll learn from it.”

  “OK,” said Diana. “That makes sense with what I know of you.”

  “It’s partly the scientist speaking,” suggested Antoinette. “You’re theorising about us and testing those theories and so forth.”

  “That’s spot on,” agreed Leanne. “And as a scientist, I have to distinguish between accepting arguments as valid or not. I accept yours as valid for entirely unscientific reasons. I don’t give that same leeway to most other people.”

  “So we know the heart of the problem,” said Trina. “We can’t help if we don’t know the rest of it. Theory isn’t the everyday. It doesn’t tell us why you look as if you’ve been crying all night.”