A Thorn In Your Memory

The universe flashes a blinding lemon yellow and it feels like something sucks the air out of my lungs, then I’m tripping over my original size eight-and-a-half feet and nearly wipe out on the gravel path. But I stay upright. I’m getting better at these transitions – I have scars on my knees from previous trips. It’s worth it, though. Who else has seen the ice cities of some alternate reality version of Brazil or the swinging carousels in that world where gravity is optional?

I mean, there’s an answer to that question, of course. I know I’m not the only traveler to have visited those versions of reality and I could probably find a way to look it up if I wanted to. We know each other, some of us, and I’m sure there are records somewhere. I think I maybe did look it up, once, but I don’t remember that now. That’s the downside of it all, for me, anyway. The stuff you lose.

But seeing all the wonders of a thousand worlds is worth it. Surely.

#

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” you said, the day I met you at one of those scams where they give you a fancy meal including wine pairings if you sit through a hard sell sales pitch to buy into a time-share scheme. You licked butter off your fingers and grinned, blue eyes twinkling in the fluorescent light. “I’m such a sucker for garlic prawns, though.”

This was before I fell through that first hole to nowhere, and discovered that I was one of the few people with the ability to travel between worlds. I can’t control it like some can, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it. Finding oneself on another planet or an alternate Earth has its advantages. It didn’t take long before I realized I could bring things back — blueprints or ideas — and turn them into money.

Back then, before that first trip, wasting three hours listening to a desperate commission-only salesperson try to browbeat me into buying two weeks’ worth of condominium seemed a small price to pay in order to get a five-course dinner. Those days, the best I could do on my own was a Happy Meal. After my startup went bust, all I had left was a couple of power suits from the days of wooing the venture capital people. It was enough to make me look like I was a likely sucker for the timeshare nonsense, and the pockets in the suit jacket held several ziplocks of leftovers. I might not have been a hotshot tech wizard anymore, but I was still plenty resourceful.

Today, sitting alone on the steppe of a blue-green alien landscape, I still remember that night, the bloviating salesperson banging on about how it practically pays for itself in saved hotel and flight costs. Why does that have to remain stuck in my brain after all these years? Our conversation I want to keep, of course, but the rest can go. However, I don’t get to choose. That’s not ever how this kind of thing works, is it?

#

The universe rolled over and I was somewhere orange and salty. I walked to the top of a set of stairs and there you were, standing on a balcony with a row of floor-to-ceiling windows behind you. You were looking out at the bright city skyline, and I thought maybe it was a mirage. Maybe it was only wishful thinking made manifest somehow. Maybe this universe worked that way. But no, it was really you who turned around and smiled at me. Some other world’s version of you.

“Hey there,” you said.

“Hello.”

There was a loaded pause.

“So… do you know me?” I said.

You shook your head but you were still smiling. I knew that smile. “No,” you said. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“It’s beautiful.” I gestured out at the vista below us, the rolling hills and domed buildings.

“The people? The city?”

“All of it.”

You smiled that smile again and I stared into your deep brown eyes and I thought I’m going to get another first kiss, who gets that lucky? when it got so bright I wondered if a bomb had gone off and then it was over.

I ended up on the lawn at the top of the hill above where I’d started out. Dirt. Again. I wasn’t surprised. I was starting to think that was the point of it all, that it was just me and the dirt, apart from the other travelers who’d passed by or lingered on this unassuming hill before me. Maybe if I could just hang out long enough, a portal would open and it would be time for the next version of the universe to roll out. I sat on the grass, pulled my knees to my chest, and tried to block out the sound of my own thoughts. It didn’t work. I didn’t know what to do next and yet again I couldn’t trust my memory to help me. It was a never-ending loop. A stream of endlessness. I scraped my fingers against the dirt.

It was the first time and the last time I ever saw you in those other worlds.

#

We were in a park, watching the children play. I held a sun umbrella over you as you showed me pictures on your phone. I knew the kids’ names, I knew what you were putting on the walls of your new condo. You held my hand. I was already fading away so it was hard to see and I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was hardly in this world at all any more.

When was the first time I met you? How could I forget that? I’ve tried so hard to remember. I still feel like I’m spending every waking moment we’re not together trying to track you down.

“Why do I feel like you’re trying to memorize my face?” you said as I felt myself leaving again, and I held your hand and told myself this was it. This time might be the last time I ever see you.

I jerked awake to the grinding sound of gears moving against one another. I didn’t understand this place or what I was doing there. Where was I?

And then I felt an axle snap, a blast of heat and the world flipped, gears churning, grinding, the axle shearing, disks spinning, rubbing against the walls of the wheel I was trapped inside. I was traveling, traveling, traveling, but still stuck inside this wheel, this merry-go-round. And I was still looking for you.

#

I always return to a park or green space, usually in the dirt. I would sit in that dirt all day if I had to. That’s how much I hate the thought of being away from you.

#

I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I felt like wet tissue paper, translucent and fragile. I wouldn’t come back the next time. You never understood it, but you believed me. Maybe that’s why I loved you – you’d always believed me.

“Did you ever regret meeting me?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” you said. “There was some regret.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. They were really tiny regrets. Like a pinch between the shoulder blades.”

“Like you had a thorn in your memory?”

You laughed. “Yeah, sort of. It’s okay.”

“I always thought you were worth every second.”

“That's sweet,” you said. “But what about you? You have regrets?”

“Just one.”

“What?”

“We’re not going to be together, and I’m starting to wonder if we were ever meant to be. I always thought it was my destiny to find you, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t ever meant to be.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” you said. “There’s no such thing as destiny. The universe doesn’t have any meaning.” You looked at me, the skin around your green eyes crinkled in thought, and smiled sadly. “None of the universes.”

#

I’m lost. I’m always lost. This time is no different. It feels as if I know where I’m going, at least. The street I want to get to is right there between the two buildings, I just can’t find it. I’m in a flying machine, small, just big enough for me and a bag. It floats up, high above the buildings and when I look down, I see that the city is a series of concentric circles on a grand scale. I’ve seen the rings of Saturn and they look something like the circles in this place — the buildings arrayed in lines like the rings around a planet I’ve actually visited. 

I might have infinite travel now, but what I need to do is find the place I’m actually going, only I can’t remember what it is.

#

It’s not only memories that I lose. Or maybe it is, but memories are what makes me who I am.

#

I find myself in the dirt, again, lying there with my head in my hands. Alone again. Always alone. Is there really no one in any of these universes I can ever connect with? Will I always have to voyage on my own? 

I wonder if there is a universe where I could just stop thinking about everything. Is there a version of my life where someone hasn’t poked a little hole in the bottom of my mind and let it all out? 

I sometimes think I imagined this job, this thing I’m supposed to be doing, to give me something to distract myself. Something to take my mind off that annoying burr in the back of my brain that says, remember – there’s something you need to remember

Maybe the next world will be the one where I get to remember who I am.

###

Released: December 15th 2021

M. Darusha Wehm is the Nebula Award-nominated and Sir Julius Vogel Award winning author of the interactive fiction game The Martian Job, as well as the science fiction novels Beautiful Red, Children of Arkadia, The Voyage of the White Cloud, and the Andersson Dexter cyberpunk detective series. Full Bio

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