“There’s a catch,” she says. “If I give you these engrams, there’s a catch.”
“Anything.”
“You signed contracts, Mr. Hunter. People paid you a lot of money to be in their digitals, and, well, you can’t just not fulfill your obligations.”
“Bereavement,” I mutter. “Can’t you tell them I’m taking time off for bereavement?”
“Yeah, I wish we could do that for you. I really do. But this is millions of dollars. The other actors, it wouldn’t be fair to them.” She leans in. I can see a hint of a tattoo on her shoulder where the blouse gapes at her neck. “And your community back home. Aren’t they counting on you? Expecting you to represent them to the world?”
I wave that away. I don’t think much about home anymore.
“There’s talk of replacing you,” she says.
I look up, annoyed. “With who?”
“The guy from Sixteen Tipis. You know the one.” She gestures towards her short blond hair. I know what she means. He’s got the wind-machine hair.
“That guy ain’t even Native. He’s Persian.”
“The engrams are yours, but you have two days. After that, it’s out of my hands.” She spreads her hands to show me just how powerless she is. But I know about Carol Elder. Rumor is she’s a billionaire, controls the fate of every digital that the studio puts out, and she’s telling me it’s out of her hands? Excuse me if I don’t believe it. But here I am, anyway. An idiot who signed a contract, and no way I can flip and smolder myself out of this one. And no way I’m letting them replace me.
The vial feels hot in my hand. She’s in there, my girl. And we can be together again.
“Two days,” Carol repeats. “That’s all I can give you. Just you and her memories and then you’re back to work, okay? Be grateful I got you this at all. Oh, and Mr. Hunter? Dez. I know you’ve been shooting scraps, but this is high-grade stuff. Don’t put this stuff directly into your brain. Find a nice VR system and load them up in an Experience like a goddamn normal person. Nothing good will come from sharing brain space with a dead person, especially when it’s biologicals.”
“Yeah. Sure.” But I’m already stumbling over to the table, my hand searching for the needle, the vial with her initials whispering my name.
Carol opens her mouth, as if to protest, but settles for shaking her head disapprovingly. My hand closes around the cap, and I twist. It opens, and for the first time in days, I smile. I don’t even notice when Carol leaves.
* * *
I wake up on the couch to someone knocking on my glass door.
“Cherie?” It takes me a minute to remember that it can’t be her. My brain comes slouching back into my noggin and I see the engram needle on the table in front of me, Cherie’s vial empty beside it. I reach for the vial, furious. Shake it, as if that’s going to reveal something I can’t see with my own eyes. But I’m a greedy bastard and I took it all and she’s gone now. My chest hurts like my heart’s gonna break in two, and tears press against the back of my eyeballs.
I wipe at my leaky eyes and notice my video display is on. It’s cycling through pictures. Sharp and technicolor. Cherie’s audition reel. There she is, dressed as a Plains Indian maiden, her hair in two braids. Another as a prostitute, her hair in two braids. Another as an alcoholic mother, her hair in two braids.
I don’t remember turning the display on, but I must have done it after I shot up the engrams, something to enhance the sensories. Looking at her, it’s like I can still feel her in my brain.
The knock comes again.
I twist around to look at the door, but there’s no one there. God, am I hearing things, too?
“I’m over here, babe.”
I yelp at the sound of Cherie’s voice coming from the kitchen. What in the entire fuck? But there she is, wearing her favorite shirt, blue jeans snug on her perfect ass. Her dark hair is twisted up in a bun on top of her head. She gives me a big smile.
“Good morning, gorgeous,” she says. “I thought you were going to sleep forever. Want some coffee?”
I stare, slack-jawed. My heart speeds up, again, this time in that grasping desperation you feel when you wake up suddenly from a really great dream you don’t want to let go.
“Are you . . . ?” I manage to stutter out.
“I’m alive in here,” she says, tapping a pretty painted nail to her temple. “As long as my engrams are still floating around in your head, I’m here.”
“That lady said they’d be potent.”
“She was right. Coffee?”
* * *
We spend the morning together. A perfect morning. Drinking coffee and laughing over shared jokes. Jokes I thought died with her, but here she is, so real. Real enough to touch. And we touch. In fact, we touch until sometime in the late afternoon, and the sun’s starting to set somewhere out there over the ocean, and I crawl out of our bed with nothing on and throw the curtains open wide so the ocean air comes in, and the dwindling daylight with it.
It’s a mistake.
“Cherie . . . ?”
She looks up at me, catching the alarm in my voice. The flesh on half her face is missing, the sunlight degrading the memory of her to skeleton and ruin. I step back, alarmed. I remember something on the news about engrams being sensitive to light, but I didn’t know they would do that. For a fleeting moment, horror crawls up my spine and plants itself in my brain, right next to my true memories of my girl, fouling them. Turning them into something out of a B-grade screamer.
“Maybe we don’t need the sunset after all,” I tell her, my voice shaking as I hastily pull the curtains closed.
“Oh.” She smiles as the light leaves the room. “Sure, Dez. We’re better in the darkness anyway.”
* * *
Dinner is a pack of cigarettes by shards of moonlight on the deck out back, the crash of the surf wild and rough in my ears. Cherie sits next to me, smiling. She’s faded and eerie where the moonlight touches her face, but I try to ignore it. Keep my eyes out on the blackness of the Pacific. Even better, close my eyes so I can’t see her at all, but can still know she’s there.
But with my eyes closed, her scent is stronger and unnervingly sweet. So, I open them.
She reaches across and lays her hand over mine. Something skitters over my fingers, and I pull back. I swear I catch sight of a black beetle crawling over the edge of the deck and disappearing into the vast stretch of sand around us. But I’m not sure.
* * *
We are in bed, me and Cherie, and I wrap my arm around her, and at first she is soft in all the right places, like I remember her. But then she is soft in the wrong places, flesh giving way where it should be firm. My fingers dip into the curve of her stomach and keep going, digging out flesh the same way the light cut away her face before, and the smell follows. I recognize it now, the startling stench of decay in my nose.
I gag. She turns toward me, sleepy and smiling faintly. Unaware that she is rotting and I can smell her doing it.
I stumble out of bed to the bathroom, the contents of my stomach coming up. Shivers rake my shoulders, and doubt settles thick in my head. This can’t be real. This is a fucking illusion, just like Cherie herself is an illusion. One I asked for, sure. One I want. Wanted.