The Transcendent by Nadia Afifi

Author:Nadia Afifi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi; gothic fantasy; flame tree press; creepy stories; science fiction; cloning; SF; The Windup Girl; Peter Watts
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2023-02-09T12:55:39+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The Binding Agent

Amira sank into the nearest seat, ignoring the shiver of the organic wall behind her, while Hugo paced the room. She sighed and rubbed her belly, mostly to stay calm. Hugo’s words had sent a kinetic thrill through her veins, but also fear. What would she, and Nova, have to do to fix Barlow’s experiment?

Longer strands of Hugo’s hair stood out in different directions, waving like small antennas as he picked up his pace. His eyes danced with excitement, darting in every direction around the room. Outside, through the window, Nova played with Hani in the dirt, crafting a toy from scraps of metal.

“When I wiped out Rozene’s memories of Victor Zhang and friends, what do you think the hardest ones were to erase?” he asked Amira.

“The pivotal, life-changing, traumatic ones,” Amira said quickly.

“Why?”

“Because those are the memories that carve the deepest neural pathways in our minds,” Amira said. “The ones we can easily recall in vivid detail, that don’t get lost in the usual mental clutter of the day. The ones that linger.”

“Exactly.” Hugo waved a hand in the air, like a conductor before a symphony. “I had to dig deep, find linked memories and triggers in her neural pathways to extract the details that Alistair Parrish wanted me to erase. He didn’t realize you can’t truly erase a memory, though. You can scramble it, make it irretrievable, twist it beyond meaning to the person. But you unraveled my work. What was the thread you pulled that undid it all? What memory did you uncover?”

“The same one we just spoke about,” Amira said. Fire leapt from her chest to the base of her throat, her anger rekindled. “The one where Rozene was given Tiresia and buried alive. She was hidden behind a dark shed in her memories. When I got her to open the door and fight through, the memory came back.”

Hugo nodded, his expression distant. He turned to Amira and a new glow of respect shone through his eyes.

“We are defined, in large part, by our strongest memories,” he said. “Memory makes a person. Our greatest triumphs and traumas, our loves and our fears. When the elderly develop Alzheimer’s – rarer than before the Cataclysm, but still not uncommon in Westport – they cease to become the people they once were. They’re shells, with only agonizing interludes when they remember. Our strongest memories are the fabric of our individual selves.”

“So for a successful consciousness transfer,” Amira added, rising from her seat, “those strongest memories have to follow.”

“Exactly!” Hugo bunched his fists and bounced on his heels like an excited child that had found a prized toy under the bed. “If you want Rozene to shine through more clearly in Nova, you have to bring those defining memories out. And if you, Amira Valdez, want that clone inside you to become you, you need to make sure your pivotal memories make it into that forming brain. Everything that hurts and everything that made you feel happiest. The times you’ve felt most alive.

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