Selected Short Stories Featuring Analog Memory Read online

Selected Short Stories Featuring Analog Memory

  by Nicolas Wilson

  Foreword

  Hi. I’m Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. Interspersed with these short stories, you’ll find snippets of novels I’m working on. I’m calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the table of contents including synopses of the stories in this collection).

  Table of Contents

  Uncanny Valley: A man forced to be a luddite in a robotic world, by medical necessity, ponders whether his new fling is human.

  Censlus: A census worker is murdered while doing his job.

  Seed: An old woman meets a familiar face in an unfamiliar setting.

  Faith Emmanuel: After a carjacking, a student finds himself financially at the mercy of a corrupt medical system.

  Family Business: A marital fight ensues after a husband involves his kids in a life of crime.

  Brickmouth: A buried vampire awakens.

  Laborious Love: A robotic engineer builds the perfect girlfriend, and the perfect relationship.

  Jesus Loves Me (Just Not That Way): A man wrestles with his sexuality.

  Unlucky at Math: An intellectual ruminates on his relationship.

  Fighting Mad: A soldier considers the toll that the military takes on Muslim soldiers.

  Cowgirl Up: A memorial for a stubborn woman's fight with cancer, and love of smoking.

  The Courage of Our Convictions: An old soldier examines the leavings of genocide.

  Medicine: A friend falls back into addiction.

  The Cost of Being Me: Some ruminations on the possibility of heaven, while dying.

  Unlucky At Math: An intellectual ruminates on his relationship.

  Randomly Accessed Memory: A head injury causes a man to lose his memory, throwing his life into chaos as he regresses to his last known lifestyles.

  Analog Memory: A former CIA operative has his memory reset in an unorthodox way, and deals with the glitches of the new technology.

  Green Thumb: A Department of Agriculture employee has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in chemicals. This short story was eventually expanded into a novel, Dag, now available.

  Dogs of War: Two Explosive Ordnance Disposal soldiers recover together, after nearly dying in an explosion. This story is part of a novella, Dogs of War, available for free to newsletter subscribers.

  Nexus: The crew of an interstellar star ship try to screw the alien species they meet before their corporate backers can screw them. This is the opening chapter of Nexus, coming summer 2013.

  Thanks From The Author

  Others Works by Nic

  Uncanny Valley

  I look out my apartment window where the sprawl of the city crushes against the sand of suburbia- at least before it drowns it, and single-family homes sprout into condos and complexes, stretching towards the sky. Looking down at the shining, gun-metal gray of brushed metal, and the shimmer of solar-panels on everything else, I remember when I first came here, how you could only see its towers scraping the sky against the horizon.

  I wish there were more of a story as to how I ended up in the tech capital of the country, but I was dating someone with wanderlust, and by the time she left me it felt enough like home that I couldn’t go back to Washington- or maybe I just couldn’t stand the cold. But I’m what some people might call a modern day Luddite, which makes me a pilgrim in an unholy land- or maybe a heretic in Techrusalem.

  The people who live here, at least the ones who don’t have their consciousness shoved up a computer’s ass, call it the Uncanny Valley, but it’s actually “Ankeny,” named for Paul Kelvin Ankeny. You’ve probably never heard of him, because he’s the definition of an underground figure. But in the robotics industry he’s basically the one true Christ, or maybe Steve Jobs if he deserved the hype- and without the corporate whoredom- you know, if you’re old enough to remember Jobs. The term “uncanny valley” was coined by Masahiro Mori, bouncing off of Jentsch’s ideas of the uncanny, who also influenced Freud. The idea is that something can be familiar, yet unsettling. In robots, and later in virtual reality, the uncanny valley was considered the space in time where technology could create near-human replicas that appeared to be organic, but inexplicably disturbed a human being.

  The term eventually fell out of favor, though robophobia was more widespread than anybody would have guessed. The Valley’s more tolerant, if only because we’ve been living with robots longer than anybody else. It’s not quite right to say robotics was born here, but, at least in the U.S., this is where our robots finally got their sea legs, where they went from tech demo to household staple.

  For years people called this Silicon Valley, though its name on maps was always Santa Clara. They changed it to Ankeny because of rumors that the Saint had prostituted herself rather than beg alms in the streets of Assisi for St. Francis. It was probably bullshit, and most people thought Ankeny and his cult of techies were behind the rumors’ sudden appearance hundreds of years later, but it gave the state legislature enough of an excuse to change the name.

  Which brings us to me. I’m probably the least likely resident of Ankeny, because I have a condition called electromagnetic hypersensitivity, sometimes rendered EHS. I don’t really give a shit that scientists have had trouble testing its existence, and even my current doctors think I’m faking it, but digital tech too near to my body gives me seizures; I also seem to be allergic to most inorganic materials, too.

  I share my apartment with two living things. One’s a gene-modded apricot tree, stunted so it’s only three feet tall. The other’s Dog; the ex named him Dogmeat after a character from a video game, but he always liked me more. So when she left, she left him, and took “my” cat; maybe he was our cat, but it never really mattered, since he seemed to like her better.

  I haven’t been sleeping well. Dog finally figured out that apricots are food; unfortunately for me, he figured that out while I was away, and by the time I got home he’d already painted the carpets with colorful shit splatters (one of the walls, too, where I assume the dam initially burst). Since then I’ve been about as vigilant as I can about picking the cherry-sized apricots, but for whatever reason his bowels still haven’t entirely righted themselves, so at the slightest noise that could be a dog expelling fruit from an orifice, I’m bolt upright (you’d be amazed how many modern background noises actually fit that description).

  This is all complicated by my apartment’s white carpet. In a normal apartment, or at least with a normal tenant, carpet nanites would clean up after the dog. I tried that once, because a doctor told me their electromagnetic aura would be so small that I’d never notice- and on that at least he was right. But, as happens with nanites, I inhaled a cloud of them; I had a tonic-clonic seizure, and spent the next month hacking up chunks of lung, coagulated blood and little robots. So I’ve been spending a lot of time kneeling, scrubbing feces and fruit smoothies out of the carpet.

  Dog’s sitting at my feet looking droopily sad, and I feel bad for him even if it's his own gluttonous fault. The tree belonged to the ex (and I don’t for the life of me know why she didn’t take it with her), but it’s alive, I’m used to it, and I’d feel bad just throwing it out simply because it shouldn’t be my responsibility (and is causing me inconvenience).

  I’m writing this for a slew of reasons. Vanity comes into play somewhere, I imagine. But mostly I’d like to think it’s because there are people out there like me who are left out of this society, and perhaps that society will change so much in tw
enty years that none of us will even remember what now was like.

  That, and I’m bored. I can’t plug my head into VR the way most people do, and VR has essentially killed television aside from programming for the Luddite elderly, so I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands. I tried reading Moby Dick, since I figured I had the time, but television and the internet have shattered my attention span for anything longer than a short story (and no, not a Melville “short” story).

  I have a kitchen you’d recognize if you’d seen any old “HD” movies, with honest to god separate appliances (none of those fancy nanite wall phalluses for me). But there’s one thing I don’t make in my kitchen anymore: coffee.

  There’s a coffee shop down the street; I hate the concept of going to a coffee shop, because spending that much money for something my kitchen appliances can make for pennies feels wrong, but the barista is beautiful. Kerry. Dark hair, brown but almost black, dark eyes, silver and blue that almost look purple, caramel skin like the color of the mochas she makes me- which are genuinely delicious (not delicious in the “she gets points for being pretty and trying” way).

  I’d been avoiding the shop the last week, after a run-in with another customer. She had ear implants- not one of those hearing aids or even augments, but she actually had speakers built into her ears so that other people could listen to