The Weapon - Oblivion - part 3 By Diana the Valkyrie Is my bum too big in this? Update: 22/07/2003 to valkyrie05 At breakfast next day, she was the usual cheerful Wendy. "I was thinking of having my hair done." I stared at her. "What?" "A hairdresser, do something with it." She shook her head, making her hair swirl. "It's a bit wild, don't you think?" she asked. "Looks fine to me," I said, remembering umpteen similar conversations from my past. She brought both her arms up and lifted her hair. "Maybe something more sophisticated?" she suggested. Umpteen conversations. Dozens. "I mean, the little girl look is all very well, but I'm over fifty now, maybe I should go for something that looks more mature?" I scratched my head. She hasn't got hair, not really. "Wendy, what do you think a hairdresser is going to be able to do? Cut it? Colour it? Be real for a moment, we both know that isn't actually hair. His scissors will break on the first snip." She let her hair fall again, only now it wasn't straight, it was sort of wavy and bouncy. "Not a problem, baby, I'll just make it do what the scissors suggest. As far as he'll know, he'll be cutting hair. Same with the colouring." "Then why do you need a hairdresser at all?" "Creative input, baby, fashion sense and an expert opinion. And while I'm at it, I thought I'd get some shopping done, my wardrobe needs considerable freshening." "You don't wear clothes," I reminded her. All her costumes were just extensions of her fields. "Don't quibble," she quibbled, "I can wear clothes if I want to. Why shouldn't I try to look my best?" It's difficult to argue with her. Retail therapy, it's called, supposed to be very good for cheering you up when you're a bit down. Oh, but there's one problem. "What about money?" "What about it?" "You can't have your hair done or go shopping without money." "Damn, there you go again with the money thing. So how do I handle that, baby?" I sighed, and handed her a small rectangle of plastic. "Use that." She took it, and flexed it a couple of times. "This is money? I thought it was all paper." "Wendy, let's not try to understand money right now, it's too early in the morning for another futile lesson in banking and economics. Just show the plastic to the people you get things from, they'll know what to do, and when they ask you to sign something, write my name the same way I write it." I'm teaching her forgery. The Guardian of Humanity, and I'm training her to be a criminal forger. "This business about you forgetting ..." I started, but she interrupted me. "Heigh ho," she said, "I've got a whole bunch of prefab buildings to get on-site, and if I don't start now, I won't get back in time to make dinner." And she was gone. She didn't bother flying out of the window these days. I hadn't been able to make the cat-flap thing that Duncan had set up for her, I'm not really handy with my hands, I'm more an all-thumbs sort of person, but she told me not to worry, she didn't really need it anyway. She came in and out using the same technique she'd used when she was impressing the UN. I suppose there must be hundreds of microscopic holes in the walls, but they didn't let the rain in or spoil the property value, so I wasn't bothered. Or maybe there was only one and she used the same one each time? There's a limit to how much detail I want to know about how she does things; would you be interested in a step by step description of how I run up stairs? But even if she wasn't worried about her forgetting, I was. It's like this. If you get a cold and you can't smell very well, then you really aren't bothered; our sense of smell is so poor anyway, we don't lose much when it's gone. Now try closing your eyes for an hour while you try to lead a normal life. Human sight works very well indeed, without it, we're very handicapped. Oh, we can cope, we're very adaptable. But everything is more complicated and takes longer to do. Wendy had a perfect memory, so she relied on it very heavily. For example, her Duncan emulation relied on her memory of him, and you know how she felt about that. Our memory isn't perfect, obviously. Far from it. But it contains all our stored experiences, and we rely on it. And our personality is the sum of our experience; without a chunk of our memory, we would have a different personality. If you remember that something happened, then you believe that it did. But there's the phenomenon of false memory, when you remember something that *didn't* happen, and therefore you think that it did. I thought about Wendy losing memories, Wendy's personality changing. I thought about the possibility of her getting false memories. I have no idea how her memory actually worked - hell, we don't know how human memories work. If this were a problem with a human, then first of all, it might not be that bad. We forget things all the time, what difference if we forget a few more things? So what if you forget the details of the first time you had sex? Betty Hargreaves. I haven't thought about her for ages. She was such a cutie. Although, of course, my memory of Betty was a composite of seeing her over a period of time, and it was probably a bit rose-tinted anyway, we tend to forget the bad bits. So - we can handle memory loss, because we get it all the time. But for Wendy, this was entirely new, and she wouldn't have the mechanisms that we have for coping with memory loss. For example; I make lists of things that I need to do, because I know that if I don't make a list, I'll forget some of it. I leave bits of paper all over the place with "To do" on the top. Wendy wasn't in the habit of doing that sort of thing. So by the time she got back that evening, I'd spent quite a long time thinking about this. "Like the hair?" she said. Oh shit, I know this scene. Fact is, it looked exactly the same as it had when she'd flown out this morning. "Yes," I said cautiously, aware of the mantraps strewn in this area, "I like it." "You like the changes?" she asked. That put me on the spot. I found out, a while back and the hard way, that lying to her isn't a good idea, because it doesn't actually work, she can tell, it's my pulse or heartbeat or something. So I dissembled a bit. "What exactly are the changes?" "It's wavier, and there's highlights. The hairdresser wanted to make it really short, like a bob, but I told him that then I wouldn't be able to wrap it round you, and he gave me a wink and a "know what you mean", and we left it long." "Yes, I like it, the highlights are red, aren't they? Reddish, I mean. Sort of a bit red." "Sort of." Then she started showing me the clothes she'd bought. She ran me through the whole gamut, from "Is my bum too big in this?" to "Do you really think this colour goes with my hair." But I already knew the answers (no and yes), no problem. Over the evening meal, I re-opened the subject. "Wendy, about this business of your forgetting things ..." "Baby, I don't forget things, I have a digital memory." "But you do." "Nonsense." "Wendy, you do." She laughed. "Wendy, do you remember the first time that you and Duncan made love?" "Yes, of course I do." "You do?" "Sure. The Rite of Binding. It was lovely." "Huh." What was going on here? She'd told me that she'd forgotten it. "Uh, Wendy, you remember last night, you remember what we talked about?" She stared at me, and then looked puzzled. "We didn't talk about anything. Did we?" "Don't you remember?" She looked confused, and said "No. I don't. How can that be?" Then she smiled, and came around the table, standing in front of me. "Would you like to go for an evening cruise?" That drove all thought of he memory out of my head, and I nodded, "Yes please!" I love flying with Wendy. It's only partly the flight and the sensation of freedom that I get, you don't get that in a 747. It's also the feeling of being held close to her, the majestic sight of those wings that she spreads out, purely for effect, of course, but still impressive. And I have to confess, I like the feeling of being completely dependent on her, totally helpless in her hands as she flies us through the air. Aerodynamically, the wings are absurd. Like a giant pigeon, or albatross. Dramatically, they are a very powerful statement. Just like the way some people think angels ought to look. We went out the front door, and shot up into the sky. "Wendy, you trust me, right?" "Of course I do, baby." "Last night, you told me that you'd forgotten your Rite of Binding. You said that Duncan asked you about it, but that you couldn't remember it." "I don't remember that conversation. or the one with Duncan." Then I had a flash of inspiration. "Ask Duncan if he remembers." He did. "He says that I told him I don't remember the Rite of Binding. But I do. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then, or at least that's what I said. I mean, that's what he says I said. No, that's what he remembers of what I said. His memory isn't digital, though. I mean it is, but it's digital emulating analog, so it's lossy. But I don't remember saying that I didn't remember." I carefully sorted out what she'd just said in my head, it was like decoding a riddle. And also, Duncan's memory was actually just a part of Wendy's memory, being used for the emulation. "Trust me, you did. Last night." "Oh." We flew in silence for a while. "David? I'm scared." "That's what you said last night." "Did I? I don't remember. David, this can't happen. I mean, it shouldn't happen. What's happening to me?" "I don't know, Wendy. All I know is that something is going wrong with your memory." "But ... but if I can't trust my memory, how do I even know what you just said? You might have said something different, and I'm remembering it wrong." We flew in silence for a while. I was thinking about this. What is reality? We don't see reality. Reality is a sequence of happenings. All we ever see is an instant, the eternal now. It's our memory that strings the now-moments into a sequence, the sequence that we call reality. If our memory was wrong, then we'd perceive a different reality. Shit. I started to explain this to Wendy. She started crying. Double shit.