Chapter 1: Memory Maker

 

The other girl’s voice seemed rather distant, compared to the noise in Katie’s mind.  It said, "What memory shall I make for you?"

Katie shuddered.  "No, thank you.”  She tried to keep her tone civil.  The other young lady was probably around Katie's age—early twenties—but Katie felt about a million years older, and she didn't want to make small talk.

"Are you sure?"   Sophie.  Her name is Sophie, and she lives three doors down from me.  "You've been working all day," Sophie said, hovering over the Memory Printer.  "You're entitled to a free picture.  At least one.”

"I think my memory is too vivid anyway," Katie said, trying to laugh off the uncomfortable incident.

 

As if anyone could find anything to remember while walking down these sterile white halls, she thought somewhat bitterly as she walked back to her room.  Her days had become all the same.  Get up.  Print the same boring memories from the same boring planets for a parade of different people.  Eat a turkey and cranberry cream cheese sandwich.  Print some more boring memories.  —Maybe it’s a blessing that they are so boring, actually.  They keep away all the things that I don’t want to remember.  Sit in her room, try to read or write letters, keep the ghosts of longing out of her head.  Do it all the next day.

"Once I said that the darkness was soft, comforting, that even if the next day would bring the same battles there was a place for me among the stars," she'd written in her journal the day before.  "At nighttime the clouds were my kingdom and I was Princess Katie of Avalon.  I would always have a new adventure waiting.  Story-making is different than just wishing.  In some ways it's the opposite.  It's not creating something just because you can’t live without it, like wishing is.  Story-making is taking poetic-pleasure, making connections, finding resonances.  It's sharing.  It's completely going outside of yourself and seeing with somebody else' mind.  Princess Katie doesn't see like I do."  She'd stopped writing to brush the tears from her eyes—how long has it been since I’ve really cried? —and kept going.  "I don't think I'm capable of that anymore.  I can only remember with a pang of wistful longing, not create new resonances and see new ideas.  Usually I just try not to think about it."

That day she'd been resigned.  This day—what was this day, anyway?  What was she thinking?  Everything still seemed so boring, so similar.  It’s like living in a black hole, that’s what it’s like.  I hate this.  The door slid aside.  She still felt a sense of loss it did that.  It revealed a neat green-walled living environment with everything in its place.  It wasn’t her room. 

Princess Katie's room had been a heap of video game parts—if they didn't have video games back in the time when she really could have been a princess, well, she lived in a completely other world rather than the Earth Renaissance past, Princess Katie would have said—half finished booby traps, and crumpled notes from Jason.  Princess Katie's room had looked like that old-fashioned snapshot on the imitation fireplace of Katie’s present imitation room: the snapshot of two children, ages eleven and thirteen, in the middle of three different board games at once with all the pieces mixed.  Skye had taken the photo.  It was an actual photo rather than a Memory Print, taken with an old-fashioned camera Katie had built out of parts Jason had rescued one at a time from his brother's old school projects.  They had used the camera a lot.  Somewhere in the neatly stacked boxes under the station bed, there were a zillion different shots of Katie's mother dressed in a Looney Tunes nightshirt, screaming while Jason made funny faces in the background.

Right there, right then, Jason wasn't there.

 Don't be a baby, Katie told herself.  He's probably forgotten all about you by now, and that's for the better. 

After all, he knew where she was working.  He knew her VideoCom address, and he certainly had the means to visit her anywhere she was, considering that he was one of the best in-route ship mechanics in the area.   He wouldn't want to see her.  That relationship was in the past, Katie always told people who were rude enough to pry.  Their old friendship was as dead as the Princess Katie and Prince Jason who had been.

I accepted that a long time ago.  So why do I still feel so depressed, so dead inside?

Skye wasn't there.

"How are you now, my friend?"  Katie whispered, although her room was empty, and would remain empty.  She didn't even have Skye's picture.  It would have been the work of a moment to print a picture out from the Memory Maker, but she was afraid even to bring Skye’s face into her mind on purpose.  The elfin smile and haunted eyes intruded into her heart too often anyway.  Ice-shadows—no, I won’t think about that.

 

"Katie, no!" Skye's high voice, higher than usual with fright, carried all the way across the crumbling ruins.

"It's your last chance to get back home!" Katie shouted back.  Here was her test: here was the place for her to be Princess Katie.  Her best friend needed her help.

They—she, Skye, and Jason—were on a mystery planet.  They had arrived through one transporter, and now faced a bewildering array of transporters to worlds across the known galaxy and outside of it.  The only other thing they knew about the strange world was that it wasn’t going to last all that much longer.  Jason was over at one of the control consoles for the different transporters, frantically trying to get the portal open to Earth, so they could go home.

Skye’s portal had been open since they arrived on the planet—that was how Katie and Skye had met in the first place, through another mystery: an unexpected portal from Earth to a world of humans in another galaxy.  Skye could have simply stepped through the moment the control world had started to crumble, but she had waited to say her final goodbye, and her portal had been suddenly blocked.  Katie knew how to remove that at another control console, and she was running for it, dodging falling stones that would have individually terrified her at any other time, focused on only one thing.

"Katie, don't!  I can go back to your planet with you.  I’ll be all right."

"No, you won't."  Katie could barely get the words out--she was out of breath, but she kept running.  Her best friend.  Her soul's sister, one who understood and shared and loved, one heart to another, one who she would miss more than her own life.  Yet Skye couldn't live in her world.  She needed her family, needed her Clan, needed the support they could give to keep her from crumbling inside, support that Katie simply didn't have to offer.  "You know you won't.  Jump!"  She triumphantly pushed the button, and Skye’s familiar house appeared in the portal.

Everything happened at once.  Skye's portal expanded to include her fields and rivers.  An enormous pillar finally cracked and tumbled down, pieces landing too closely to Katie, who was frozen catching a last glimpse of Skye's face, trying to convince herself there was a hint of confidence, a hint of a smile.  Skye wavered and vanished as a huge rock rolled over Katie's leg. 

 

            Katie sang a nursery rhyme loudly to herself, filling the empty room.  She couldn't think about the thing that had happened.  It was over.  Once she had that moment of being treasured, cherished, and that moment would have to be enough.  She sang louder, distracted for a moment by the stupidity of the lyrics, and then stopped, shaking her head.  Even that held too many memories for her to sing comfortably.  Once she and Jason had tortured the cat with that very song, only to have Jason's mother walk in leading a roomful of offended company.

She couldn't turn out her light.  The memories would circle and circle and circle.

She could very well make an enormous mess of her room!!!  Katie pushed the button under her environment panel labeled "music" and set the volume to its maximum.  Then she pulled out her paints.  Paints—while they were art tools even more old fashioned than cameras, she used them because it took work to get the images out on paper rather than just forming a picture in her mind and sending it to the Memory Maker.  Plus, Katie liked getting colors all over her hands and in her hair.  She wasn't going to paint princesses.  She wasn't going to paint portraits at all—or objects in the video games that she used to share with Jason—or illustrations for the poems she and Skye used to put together…she thought hard.  Cards.  She was going to make greeting cards.

It was only much later that she realized she was still writing her poetry, the words seeming to burn themselves in her mind.  Her words weren’t dead after all, although her poem wouldn't finish.  How can you look at this ball of despair?, she thought over and over, searching for the end.  How can you see one who wants to be changed?  How can you open who hasn't a prayer?  Carelessly shaped and forever estranged?  How can you love while it's hurting a friend?  How can what’s good turn against all the world?  Is there anything that I could send...

Shut up, Katie. she thought sternly when she realized what she was doing.   Paint.

 

"Someone didn't get enough sleep!"

"Shut up, Sophie."

Sophie made a face.

"Here.  I made this for you." I didn’t mean to snap.  Maybe this will make up for it.  She handed Sophie the card, hoping that it would clear the air.  Actually, I hope that she leaves me alone.

"Thank you.  Hey, you’re quite an artist, Katie.  Why won't you use the Memory Maker?  You must have so many other pictures you could put up for the rest of us—"

"I can't," Katie said.  She'd long since given up making excuses for not using it.  She only said those words in her tired voice, again and again.

"Well, that's kind of selfish—"

 "Shut up, Sophie."

Sophie's mouth snapped shut, and the woman returned to her own desk and turned her back. 

Great job, Katie.  Why don't you alienate a few customers now?

 

The first customer, a tall gentleman in a business spacesuit, seemed to have something in mind besides obtaining a family or vacation portrait.  His features held a nervous expression, and he moved back and forth slowly although there was no line, a few paces at a time.  "This is private," he said finally, "isn't it?"

"No one will see your pictures except you and me," Katie said in her best professional tone.  "If there's a hint of illegal or harmful activity I have to report it, of course, but otherwise I promise that your pictures will go no farther." He didn't have to worry about her seeing his pictures.   The customers can usually make pictures of their mothers in kimonos with their hair dyed blue-green, and I never notice.

"This isn't illegal, but—" He shifted again.  "Look, Ma'am, is there a copier away from all these eyes..." he motioned to all the bustle and commotion in the printing room.

"We could use the machine in the office.  Of course, that will be ten credits extra per usuable print." 

     "That will be fine.  By the way, my name is Leonard," he said as she led the way. "And you are..."

She never told anyone her last name.  It was part of the dead past.  "Katie."  They reached the office, and Katie started to warm up the official Memory Machine, leaving the door wide open.

 "Katie.  Promise me you won't share these with anyone?"

 "Of course.  Place your hand here on the Palmreader,” she motioned him over to the machine, “Now hold your picture in your head.  Ready?"

He nodded slightly.

A blueprint emerged.  Katie wouldn't have the foggiest idea what kind of machine it was for.  Jason’s brother Brent was the one who was good at that.  Not me.  Not that she really cared.  "Another?"

"Just one more"

Another blueprint emerged.  She handed him the pictures, puzzled as to why he had made his privacy into such a big deal.  "You're done.  Do you want me to put these in an envelope to take up to the desk?"

"Of course."

She packaged his prints and marked his twenty credit service charge on the outside of the envelope. "Here you go, sir.  Thank you."

"Wait, Katie," Leonard said.  "Can you keep a secret?"

 "Of course I won't tell anyone what you printed, but I don't understand why these blueprints are so private for you."  She laughed.  "My friend Jason's brother could probably visualize the machine that following them would build, but I certainly can't.  Most people don't have that kind of knowledge."  Why did I bring up Jason?  I never talk about Jason!

"I didn't mean that I wanted you to keep the prints secret.  In fact, I've already built the machines, and I was only printing the plans to add to my scientific records. What I meant was, you seem like the kind of person I could trust to see the actual machines.  I need someone to help me test one of them out."

Just like Jason had asked her to do with his own crazy inventions.  He would invent the practical jokes, I would spring them, and then we would ways  to use them on his parents or mine.  Once upon a time, way before Skye.   "Uh…what are they for?"

"Well, you see, I'd originally intended to build a device to help a person forget.  With all of this remembering going on" –again he pointed out toward the memory room, now at its busiest, crowded with families returning from colleges and vacations–"it’s not easy to notice that there are also things best left in the past, best not remembered.  That was my hypothesis for my research project.  I was originally studying the human mind, but that study led me into the study of time itself."

"You invented a time machine?" That’s illegal…even if it was possible.  Skye and I used to talk about visiting the past, but we knew that we didn’t have the foggiest chance of actually doing it..

"Not exactly.  I invented a machine that changes time, but for each person it changes only one specific moment in time.  It's like giving someone a second chance to change something important.  You know, like when people want to forget their crucial mistakes, and the best way for them to heal is to let them redo those mistakes."

"Hold on.  Wouldn't that be really dangerous?  You know, like if someone let a person live who ends up destroying a whole bunch of people?"  Katie had seen the movies about time travel and read the stories.  Mostly with Skye, and we had some good philosophical conversations, too…no, I won’t think about that. 

"I’ve set up precautions,” Leonard said, bringing her back to the present.  “I can't explain them without showing you, but I have set up precautions.  One of those is that you don't get a third chance.  You can't revisit the same moment more than once.  The second chance is truly the last."

            "Wow..."

"I did build another machine.  The second blueprint was to document the invention I made to complete my original research.  Sometimes people want to forget things that are not necessarily mistakes, and I did build a device to help people forget.”  He shrugged.  “When I got myself back on track, it was easy by comparison.”  Leonard paused another moment, looked down, and then gave her an earnest, penetrating look.  “Katie—I saw something in your eyes.  There are memories you would rather live without."

She nodded slowly.  Why am I so cold?  I’m shivering from head to foot.

"I want to give you a chance to think about this.  You could lose those memories.  You would be the same person you've always been, just truly unhindered by the burdens you carry.  Or you could try to change the past, to go back to one of those haunting moments and see if you can do something differently.  You could try to correct the things that led up to those burdens.  But you can only do one of the two." He shrugged.  "Or neither, if you never want to see me again.  But here's my card.  Show up tomorrow after you finish work if you're still interested."

As quickly as he had come, Leonard was gone.