Uncanny Valley by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

8

Adam changed his car’s destination to downtown Gardena. He disembarked beside a row of fast-food outlets and went looking for a public web kiosk. He’d been fretting about the best way of paying without leaving too obvious a trail, but then he discovered that in this municipality the things were as free as public water fountains.

There was no speck of entertainment industry trivia that the net had failed to immortalize. Colman had moved from London to Los Angeles to shoot the series, and he’d been living just a few miles south of Adam’s current home when the break-in happened. But the old man had still been in New York at the time; he hadn’t even set foot in California until the following year, as far as Adam recalled. The laptop that he’d started excavating had files on it dating back to the ’90s, but they would have been copied from machine to machine; there was no chance that the computer itself was old enough to be carrying deleted emails for flights booked three decades ago, even if the old man had been foolish enough to make his journey so easy to trace.

Adam turned away from the kiosk’s chipped projection screen, wondering if any passers-by had been staring over his shoulder. He was losing his grip on reality. The occlusions might easily have been targeted at nothing more than the old man’s lingering resentment: If he couldn’t let go of what had happened—even after Colman’s death, even after his own career had blossomed—he might have wished to spare Adam all that pointless, fermented rage.

That was the simplest explanation. Unless Auster had been holding back, the thought of the old man murdering Colman didn’t seem to have crossed his mind, and if the police had come knocking he would surely have mentioned that. If nobody else thought the old man was guilty, who was Adam to start accusing him—on the basis of nothing but the shape and location of one dark pit of missing memories, among the thirty percent of everything that he didn’t recall?

He turned to the screen again, trying to think of a more discriminating test of his hypothesis. Though the flow into the side-load itself would have been protected by a massive firewall of privacy laws, Adam doubted that any instructions to the technicians at Loadstone were subject to privilege. Which meant that, even if he found them on the laptop, they were unlikely to be incriminatory. The only way the old man could have phrased a request to forget that he’d bashed Colman’s brains out would have been to excise all of the more innocent events that were connected to it in any way, like a cancer surgeon choosing the widest possible sacrificial margin. But he might also have issued the same instructions merely in order to forget as much as possible of that whole bleak decade—when Hollywood had fucked him over, Carlos had been grieving for the woman who raised him, and he’d somehow, just barely, kept it together, long enough to make a new start in the ’20s.

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