Sequence Six: Transience

John blinked, and blinked again, and his vision cleared.

"Did it happen just now?" the ophthalmologist asked him.

"No," John said. "I was just getting the drops out of my eyes."

The ophthalmologist sat back in his chair thoughtfully. "Describe the effect again?"

"Well," John said, "sometimes it's like I'm seeing through a screen door. Everything looks kind of..." He cast a glance at the ophthalmologist, hoping the doctor would jump in and supply the right word.

The doctor watched him dispassionately. No help there, which rankled John because the ophthalmologist had a degree in these things. John didn't. John was an engineer, not a doctor. And though he worked at Sentience, the world's largest manufactory of autoconstructs and other artificial intelligence units, John specialized in nanochip design. He didn't have anything to do with ocular systems. He didn't have the vocabulary that a visual design tech or an ocular engineer might use to describe the sort of visual distortion he'd been suffering.

The pause extended awkwardly. "Everything looks pixelated," John finished.

The ophthalmologist frowned. "Now, tell me... are you seeing any flashing light?"

John shook his head. 'Not seeing any lights that aren't actually there."

"Are your eyes focusing normally?" the ophthalmologist asked.

"Yes, though I do suffer a little eye strain. Sixteen, eighteen hour days staring at the holofield..."

"You really should take a six-minute break every hour, try to focus your eyes on distant objects. Look out a window." The ophthalmologist skipped a finger over the dataflat, scrolling through John's medical records. "I don't see anything here to suggest a history of vision problems... How long has this been happening?"

John wiped at his still-damp eyes with a thumb. "Maybe a month... two months? I started to notice it late at night, when I'd be nodding off while reading, or watching a movie, or even talking to someone... Suddenly, there's this effect over my eyesight, like I'm seeing through gauze."

"Gauze? Or screen door?" the ophthalmologist asked. "I mean, does the focus go soft? Do you see any sort of halo effect with light?"

"No. It's crisp, not diffuse," John said.

The ophthalmologist frowned again, as though unsure what that meant.

"I mean... it just looks like I'm staring at a low-grade image on a failing flat-screen." John had worked on his share of antiquated, junk-quality tech.

None of that seemed to make sense to the ophthalmologist, either.

"Do you have a sense of burning in your eyes? A feeling of dryness?" he asked.

John sighed to himself.

***

"So what did he say?" Krista asked.

It was Sunday morning, and the February weather was gorgeous and warm. The air offered a trace of moisture, as if in anticipation of the rains to come in March and April. After that, scorching summer heat would mark the months of May through October. But for the moment, on this perfect morning, the world had a soft and forgiving feel about it. John had invited Krista to join him for a late breakfast before they went to the theater - a treat they indulged in a couple times each month, along with croissants and gossip about their respective sex lives.

They sat at the table on John's deck, which commanded a view of the communal green from seven stories up. John poured Krista another glass of orange juice and then pointed at the sweating champagne bottle, as yet unopened.

"God, yes," Krista giggled.

John set about peeling away the gold foil and untwisting the wire cage that trapped the cork. "Well," he said, the wire unraveling under his fingertips, "the eye doctor had me come back a couple of days later and he put more drops in my eyes, and scanned my retinas yet again, and repeated the same questions another dozen times, while I tried to describe what it looks like."

The cork launched itself as soon as the wire cage came off. Startled, John covered the gushing mouth of the bottle with a dishtowel. Sweet smelling foam dripped and soaked into the towel.

"And it looks like?" Krista asked, holding out her glass.

"Like I told you," John said, wrapping the bottle with the towel and splashing some champagne into her juice. He then poured into his own waiting glass. "As though everything were pixels."

"So the eye doctor was totally useless," Krista jumped ahead. "Did he refer you?"

"Yes, finally," John said. "He sent me to a neuro doctor, who ran more scans and gave me some more tests, and finally came up with a diagnosis."

"Well?" Krista held her glass by the stem, watching him, her eyes keen, a smile playing on her face. "What did he say?"

***

"Memory enhancement," the neuro doc said.

John shook his head, confused.

"You might not recall getting it done," the doc continued, "because the procedure often has that side effect - it seems to erase itself from the subject's recollections. But the visual disturbance you're describing is another very common side effect, especially if a patient has undergone multiple procedures."

"Um, and - what is memory enhancement, exactly?" John asked.

"Well, in your profession it's usually done to increase visualization capacity, proficiency with mental calculations, and the ability to store and recall technical data," the doc said. "Different people use it in different ways. Memory enhancement can expand your ability to store and manipulate information in your brain, but it can also be used to create and implant synthetic memories."

"Like in 'Blade Runner?' " John guessed.

The doc heaved a put-upon sigh. "At least you didn't say 'Total Recall,' " he groused. "No, son, not like in the movies. Memory is already very pliable, very elastic and easily shaped and re-shaped. If someone wants to create a false memory - a psychiatrist, for example - he'd do it by having you perform the hard work, though you might not be aware that's what you're doing. He'd suggest, insinuate, lead you along... and you would invent the memories he was implying that you ought have."

John didn't quite get what the neuro doc meant by that.

"Like in 'No Moleste,' " the doc said, citing a Venezuelan thriller that had been popular a year or so before.

"Oh, I get it," John said. "What to they call that? Atronic memory?"

"Iatrogenic," the doc said. "Purposely or inadvertently falsified by the doctor or the shrink treating the patient."

"But this is different," John said.

"Well, yes and no," the doc said. "Sometimes the brain responds to the generation of new memory capacity by trying to fill in what it perceives to be blanks in the memory matrix. It has to do with how the brain's autonomous memory filing system operates - how it indexes memory, so to speak. It's the fact that the memory system is so complex that makes memory enhancement so dodgy to begin with, but there's such an economic impact around the procedure that it's never going to be reigned in no matter how many people's brains get scrambled..."

"Wait, it scrambles people's brains?"

The doc chuckled reassuringly. "You're not in such bad shape, son. Your brain is just pulling tricks on you, creating new memories out of shards of old memories, and projections built on those shards. Most of the time, those false memories are trivial. The problem is that sometimes they can trigger other areas of the brain, too, and create false real-time experiences."

John looked at the doctor, wide-eyed, freaked out.

"Hallucinations," the doc clarified.

"I could see things that aren't there?"

"Or your perceptions of things that are there could be altered. You could imagine a different face on the person who is speaking to you. Hear words they aren't actually saying, or hear their words but interpret them in totally different ways to what they mean. When your brain is well rested, the illusions it generates are seamless and detailed. But when you start to fatigue, the illusion can begin to degrade - the image you think you're seeing can look less sharp, less complete... less real. Eventually, in acute cases, the brain's sensory processes can start to fail. The filled-in and made-up stimulus... the hallucinations... can start to become like waking dreams. Words vanish from books. Things can seem to happen for no reason, or in reverse order.... A cigarette un-burning as the minutes go by, for example. Faces might seem to melt..."

"Melt?!" John yelped.

The doc smiled. "I don't think you're that far gone, son. I think you can address the problem now and you'll be fine."

"What do I have to take?" John asked. "Is it expensive?"

"No pharma," the doc said, and John sighed with relief. "What you need is a combination of tech therapy and mental clarity exercises. If you feel you're confronted with an hallucination, what you need to do it face it, focus on it, deliberately review your recollections associated with that thing... and use this." The doc turned, rummaged in a shallow desk drawer, and pulled out a small device. "Just press the flat end to your temple while you concentrate on the hallucination, and turn it on by pressing the button on the grip. Here. See? Focus on the hallucination for thirty seconds, minimum, or longer if you need to - up to three minutes is safe. The device will map the false memory trail in your brain structure and then eradicate it. The procedure will become quicker and more effective the more you practice."

"It's a memory un-enhancer?" John asked.

"It's a memory enhancement stabilizer, that's what it is. A MES, for short."

"A mess," John snorted. "A fitting tool for a fitting guy."

The doc took no notice of John's pun. "The device helps train your brain to use its new capacities properly, without also creating false memories and sense-impressions."

John thought back to the doc's words later, and wished he'd pressed for more details about what, exactly, all of that meant.

***

"So you're trippin,' " Krista said.

"Pretty much," John smiled. "But I have to tell you, it works. And I never realized before how much of my everyday life has gotten to be 'enhanced.' Like that painting in my bedroom..."

"What painting?" Krista asked.

"Exactly," John laughed. "It's so bright and colorful and elaborate. That's how I would see it anyway, but most of that was hallucinated. My brain would fill in a lot of detail. In reality, it's very minimalistic. Two stick figures and a barren tree. But I imagined a whole garden."

Krista still looked puzzled. "John, there's no painting in your room."

"And you'd know?"

"I've been in your room lots of times. I have to go through there to get to the bathroom."

"Yeah, yeah, where I leave the seat up, inconsiderate host that I am."

"Worse, you never clean the place, but... I'm serious, John, you don't have a painting."

"So you say, but at least three guys have commented on it. Stop screwing with me and drink your screwdriver."

"Mimosa," Krista said. "Not screwdriver. That's a different drink. We're not drinking screwdrivers. And you don't have a painting. And, what guys? You're always complaining that you never get lucky."

"Until lately," John sang, puffing his chest. "The last month or so, I have gotten so much action - "

"Uh, yeah, but when?"

"Weekends. Evenings."

"While you were working twenty-hour days six days a week, preparing for the roll-out of the new Iode model?"

John paused, trying to parse what Krista was saying.

"John, you haven't had time to play with guys."

"You make time when you get horny enough," John said, but he sounded uncertain. Suddenly, he stood up and marched through the sliding door, off the deck and into the living room. He made a sharp left turn, cut in front of the bar dividing the dining area from the kitchen, and disappeared up the short hall. Krista followed, and found him standing in his bedroom.

"See?" she said. "No painting."

"But it was here," John insisted.

"See?" Krista said. "No painting."

John turned to her, very slowly. She had repeated the words with the exact cadence and inflection. "No," he said.

Krista eyed him. "It's true, John. I'm not fooling you. I sure didn't take any pictures down off your wall..."

John drew the MES from his pocket and pressed the flat end to his temple. Pressing the activation switch, he focused on Krista - on her voice, the look on her face, the many memories of good times they'd had, the funny stories she told him about her string of inept boyfriends, sexual klutzes and flustered geeks...

He realized that her descriptions could have been of many of the men he'd dated himself. He realized, too, that Krista looked like Rhona, a girl he'd known in third grade... a girl he hadn't thought about in over twenty years, but here she was, grown up... and Krista, John remembered, was the name of a blond, sullen girl who'd also been in their class briefly, before she disappeared one day and there was a rumor her mother had her taken out of school because she had a disease. But others said that Krista's father beat her mother, and one afternoon her mother made a run for it - to Arizona, they said, and she took Krista with her - picked her up from school and headed to Arizona right from the school yard, not even going by home first...

And no one had ever seen Krista again. And Rhona had gone into medicine so, when fourth grade began, she was in a different school abteilung, a building situated clear across campus somewhere, while John and most of the other boys went to the engineering and industrial abteilung...

The device was warm in his hand. His vision had swarmed with pixels, with dissociated colors... now it cleared. There was no Krista, and there was no painting. John stood in his bedroom, alone.

***

It was surprising and shocking and, eventually, depressing, how much of his life was illusory. John's favorite book: Once his memory got sorted out, he realized he'd mentally merged two different books with generally similar plots, creating his own mischung and matching up his favorite characters from each. His old letterman jacket... it flickered before his eyes one afternoon as he tried it on, wondering if he should wear it to the office celebration, a party honoring the success of the newest generation of sanitation servitor that Sentience had brought out a month before. The new servitor had sold twelve million units in just over five weeks, which meant bonuses all around. Which meant John could afford a new jacket, because he treasured letterman jacket was a fake, the outgrowth, he supposed, of bogus memories detailing high school athleticism.

The MES revealed the letterman jacket for what it was, a faux leather jacket, dun brown. Undistinguished - like John's high school years, where he had never been a letterman or played on a team. The jacket and the memories around it were mere wish fulfillment. And his cat... Proxy, a sweet tiger-striped ginger cat, sometimes a little aloof but always up for a cuddle when the nights grew cold... He'd adopted her from a shelter, which was a total happenstance since he'd only gone to the shelter with a friend for an unrelated reason... But Proxy was a figment, based on a storybook about a cat he'd read when he was seven.

Jesus Christ, seven. How much of his life was real, anyway? Almost none of it?

So it seemed. As John continued to identify and correct the illusory parts of his life and surrounds, his home kept getting emptier and drabber. A whole room disappeared. Then the deck, too, vanished. The sliding door was just a plate glass window, looking down at neglected brown metagrass, which said something about the tenement John found himself in, because it took a lot to kill metagrass - that was, after all, the point of the genetically engineered ground cover. But then the grass and the three-story view also vanished, and he was in a sloppily rehabbed saltbox of a house, with gravel and debris all around. And one scraggly tree.

That's where John lived for almost a whole year, trying his best not to see any wavering walls or flickering clothes or suddenly gauzy-looking furniture. But when he would notice how the toaster seemed to flicker between two hues of beige, or when the sink flashed from enamel to rusty brushed metal and back again, he dutifully deployed the MES, and his world got worse... smaller, colder, cheaper, grayer. Always worse.

His photo album, stuffed with family memories: That disappeared, along with the memories. The shell he'd collected on a class trip to the Azores... well, the trip was real, probably, but the sea life had long been extinct by then.

John stood in front of the mirror, a plastic razor in his hand - his much older hand, not the thirty-three-year-old hand it should have been. He was probably almost twice that age, he realized. Leaning in, surveying how hollow his eyes looked, how grey his stubble, how deep the lines that crossed his face one way and another...

And then, in the mirror, his face wavered.

He was young, with a shock of thick, dark red hair, and lovely unblemished skin, plump skin, and a smile to go with it...

And then he was gaunt and grizzled, and...

And then he was ancient, his skin tarnished with mottled brown growths that resulted from decades of exposure to brief snatches of sunlight no longer filtered by the now-nonexistent ozone layer...

Eyes welling with tears, John looked at the razor in his hand and saw the MES there, waiting. He brought the device up in his bony hand and pressed it to his temple. He stared hard into the mirror and tried to remember his life. Only... so little of it remained. He tried to wish himself a proper goodbye, but before he managed it...

The mirror was empty.

The house was nothing but crumbled walls and shattered roof, and the scrubby tree in the gravel was gnarled and dead. On its desiccated bark, a rare butterfly reposed. Then, with a flicker of orange wings, the butterfly flitted out into the gathering night.

For Rebecca

"Sequence Six" returns with Season 5 in May, 2017.