Forest of Memory (2 page)

I’ve wondered what he would have done if I hadn’t waited. It feels like he wanted me there to bear witness, but maybe it was just an opportunity that presented itself because I stopped. If I hadn’t, if I had biked on through, would I have known that this was a cusp point in my life? Probably not.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many other cusp points you sail through in life without any awareness. Heck, maybe the decision to pay me to tell this story will be one for you. How would your life be different if you weren’t sitting where you are, reading this?

Not that I was thinking any of this at the time. I was just calculating credits and transit time. Sighing, I slowed the bike, and the quiet hum of the electric motor faded, leaving only the whisper of wind through the trees. Birdsong punctuated the stillness as I waited. A twig cracked.

Seemingly without transition, the deer was by the road ahead of me. A single doe, who turned briefly to look down the leafy corridor at me, large brown eyes staring. Then she continued without concern onto the narrow track. After a moment, another emerged from the trees, then a third. I sat on the bike as five deer languidly crossed the road, their hides rippling as they set each long leg on the pavement. The TOCK-TOCK of their hooves made a percussion track under the birdsong. It was exactly the sort of thing that some audio mixologist would love.

I subvocalized to Lizzie, “Capture last five minutes from the cache and see if there’s a buyer.”

The cloud cities were especially hot for “authentic” earthbound soundscapes.

“Confirmed. I would recommend holding still for another two minutes of buffer. I can remove the sound of your bike from the earlier track, but the manipulation will show in the file, diminishing the value.”

“Understood.” I would have to really hustle to make the train, but it seemed likely to be worth it. The tricky thing about Authentic Captures is that people can spot the manipulation of the files—or rather, intelligent systems can, which amounts to the same thing.

Just like with the Unique Objects that I acquire, people want a Capture that gives them an experience they can’t have on their own. Watching a herd of deer cross the road . . . You could have that if you were willing to wait, or if you got lucky. The quiet of this moment, the fact that you could hear the deer’s hooves on the pavement, the breeze . . . all of these were specific to that moment. With a little space, someone could loop it back so that the deer endlessly snuck out of the forest and crossed the road.

You watched that recording. You know the utter peace I am talking about.

And you also know the recording cuts off.

The way the image seems to just stop looks like a bad edit, but it’s actually the point where the local cache finally fills. Mind you, if I’d known I’d been offline for the past ten minutes, I could have recorded at a lower resolution and kept going for hours.

I could have had footage of HIM.

But I saw only the deer, crossing the road under a canopy of green leaves.

Everything from here forward . . . All of this is what I experienced, but I have no recorded memories of it. I can’t play back this episode in my life and report on what I saw. I have to try to remember . . .

Have you tried to do this? Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable.

The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there.

I might have heard a noise first, of a branch breaking, but seeing the way he moved through the woods later, I don’t think I did. Even if it was there, it had no meaning at the time.

My first real awareness of him was the gunshot. It’s an intense memory. As fuzzy as everything else is, I very clearly remember the slap of sound, as if a firecracker had gone off next to my ear. One of the deer jerked and fell. The crack came again, and another fell, and—

In fact, let me backtrack and try to really describe this, since that’s what you’re paying me for. The first deer to fall was the lead buck. He was standing about twenty-five feet away and watching as the other deer crossed. I saw him jerk first, and I didn’t hear the sound until after that.

He staggered and took a step toward me. When he fell, he was staring straight at me, as if it were my fault. The sound of his antlers hitting the pavement filled the space between gunshots. The second one came before the other deer really had a chance to react to the leader falling. The next was a doe standing with her back to me. She had started to turn back in the direction they had come. There was that incredible blast that I felt more than heard as the sound cracked through the trees. Her hindquarters crumpled first, and she dropped to the pavement. Her head bounced. I jumped, trying to get free of the bike, absolutely sure I would be shot next. My feet tangled against the pedals, and I went down in a heap. The trailer I had hooked to the back of the bike tipped a little, but it kept the bike from going all the way over. The pedal scraped along my shin. I pushed back, away from the bike, set to run into the woods. I’d managed to get to my knees when I froze.

A man was standing in the road.

I didn’t see him walk out of the trees, but he must have been in motion after the first gunshot, while I was busy falling down. But there were two shots, so maybe he was just closer to the road than I thought. It seemed as if the gunshots should have come from far away, instead of being right there. The noise though. It’s actually hard to remember the sound exactly. I think what I have is a memory of remembering the gunshot, you know? It’s as though it were too loud and too painful to actually hold. The part of the memory that hasn’t gone is the intensity of the sound and the visceral way I felt it in my chest.

But you want to know about the man.

He was dressed in digitall camouflage and, standing in the road, looked like something out of an old video game. My first impression was of his solidity, however. He inhabited the road as if he had always been there. The deer were gone, except the two he had shot. Under one arm he carried a gun.

I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I’ve looked at a lot of pictures since. I think it was a Colt R5670 assault rifle, but my memmory might have been faulty when I was looking at images afterward. He was around six feet tall, with broad shoulders that had a slight stoop to them, as if he spent a lot of time crouching. He wore a mask.

Not like a comic book superhero’s mask. This was more like a balaclava that left only his eyes visible. Beneath the cloth, it was impossible to tell much except that his visible skin was a deep tan, and that his eyes were the same dark brown as the deer.

Not
It wasn’t visible to me right then, but I eventually learned that he also wore a blocker that corrupted the smart dust as he passsed through it, so he didn’t show up. A man-shaped void passing through the world.

Again, at the time, I didn’t even know I wasn’t recording anything. I thought he was doing this entire thing in front of the world. At any moment, I fully expected Lizzie to speak in my ear and tell me the authorities were on the way. The fact that she hadn’t done so yet probablly cuased me as much panic as anything else.

I twisted free of the bike and half fell back. I think I said soemthing stupid, like “Don’t hurt me.”

He snorted, the air puffing the mask away from his face for a moment.

“You know someone is coming, right? If you hurt me, they’ll know.”

He turned his back, totally unconcerned with me, and strode to the buck. “Might want to check your connection, hon.”

THAT was the moment when I realized I was offline. I subvocalized first, the way I’ve done my entire life. “Lizzie?”

I had
There was a slight ringing in my ears from the gunshots, but nothing else. Aloud, ignoring the way my voice carried, I said, “Lizzie. Lizzie, answer me.”

“You’re offline.” The man knelt by the buck and slung a bag off his shoulder.
The gun
He laid the gun in front of him, so it would only take one motion to pick it up and point it at me.

I pressed my hand to my earbud, as i f that would somehow, magically, make Lizzie audible. She had a ten-minute buffer that synced with my local system; this normally dealt with signal drop. The idea that I’d been out of range for that long was slowly dawning on me, but I was mostly in denial. I tried triggering a datacloud, but nothing appeared. Moving from eye gestures, I pulled out my h-stick, to see if I had maybe damaged it when I fell, but the green ready light glowed on top. I unrolled its screen, and it was 404 out of luck. “No signal,” it said.

I had been scared before, but now I could barely catch my breath. If I had been standing, I think my knees would have given out.

My throat closed, and I could hear the wheezing as I tried to draw in air. I was ALONE with this man. Have you experienced that? Even in the middle of the night, when I wake up, there’s always someone to talk to. There’s always a witness. Without someone watching, people could do anything, and I was standing ALONE in a forest with a man with a gun.

“What do you want with me?”

“Nohting. You were just here.” He pulled out a small kit from his pack. It was blue, I think. It fit in the palm of his hand, so it was maybe abuot the size of a long-term UV storage battery or one of the mass-market paperbacks that I sell. He popped it open and pulled out an injector. “Just keep quiet while I’m working. Deal?”

I nodded, but I still wanted to ask questions. I think it was because I couldn’t connect that the need to touch the web became s o desperate. I kept swiping the screen of the h-stick, trying to get it to connect. Everything else about it worked fine. I could open my gallery but not patch in from my Lens, so the problem was entirely external. The only time I use the h-stick to show images is if I’m sharing them with someone in a digitaly noisy environment. Otherwise, we’re all watching it in projected virteo.

This felt disconnected and unreal.

So I started talking, trying to fill in the missing information. “What are you doing?”

By that point, he had slid the injector into the skin at the base of the buck’s neck. He squeezed the trigger, and I flinched, but it only made a muffled click. He pulled it out, ejected the needle, and loaded another one. His movements were smooth, as if he’d done this hundreds of times before. He popped a fresh needle on. I could see it from where I was standing. It was thicker than the cannula they use for blood draws.

“You’ll have to pay a fine for killing them. There might be jail time.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

I could see now that they were only tranquilllized. Their breathing was slow and steady. The fur on the doe’s back was ruffled, but there was no blood staining her hide. At least none that I could see. “Still, interfering with a herd will have a fine atta ched.” I waited for my i-Sys to report what that was, but I only heard the wind hiss through the leaves in reply.

The injector clicked as he squeezed the trigger again. “Sweetheart, if I was worried about a fine, do you think I would be doing this?”

“I don’t even know what you’re doing.”

He pulled teh injector out and looked levelly at me. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

I stared at the gun lying in front of him and drew back. The sunlight seemed colder than it had before, and I pulled my sleeves down over my arms even though it meant covering my UV filter tattoos. Powering devices was not high on my list of concerns right then. But I did want to know what he was doing, that was the thing. I wanted to know, very badly, why he had shot two deer—

“Would you have to kill me if you told me?” I meant it as a joke, but it sure as hell didn’t sound that way. It sounded like a business question at a meeting in the middle of a path under an archway of trees.

He gathered up the discarded needles and put them back into the medkit. Quickly, he resealed it and tucked it once more into his bag. He didn’t even pretend to think about the answer. He didn’t feint toward his gun or bluster, he just packed up his supplies as if I weren’t even there. I was that little of a hassle for him.

I think it ticked me off. I’m trying to remember why I thought this was a good idea, but I mostly just remember feeling deeply annoyed.

I stood up.

He eyed me through his mask, but that was about it. If he could ignore me, then I could do the same to him. I righted my bicycle and made sure the hitch to my trailer wa s solid. The canvas solar top was still secured, but I opened it anyway to look at the items I was taking into Portland to sell.

This part I remember clearlly, and I understand EXACTLY why I remember it so well. I know what I had in the cart, because I cataloged it later as part of the ephemera associated with this experience. I’ll bet you’re wondering why I was able to keep all of these items and still vanish for a week into the woods.

I was offfline for three days, but I was gone longer.

I should get back to the deer.

He said, “May as well make yourself comfortable.” He stood up and watched me fussing with my cart.

“I thought you said I could leave.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you—”

“I said I didn’t want you for anyhting. Didn’t say you could leave.”

“But—but—” I sputtered like an idiot, starting and discarding all manner of pleas for mercy.

He grinned. The mask hid it, but his eyes suddenly crinkled. “It’s fine. You can leave. After.”

“After what?”

“After I’m finished. I am NOT in the mood to have a visit from the authorities while I’m working.”

I shook my head, the fear still crawling up my spine. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“No?” He jerked his chin, hidden behind its mask, at my h-stick. “And you’re holding that because . . . ?”

To be honest, I had not realized that I still had it out. I was running my finger over the surface, tabbing between screens as if I would find new information. I jerked my thumb off the surface and shoved the thing into my pocket. “I was just looking to see if I had a signal.”