"Wha—" Szpindel had lots. "You will be, if you don't—"

"You leave me here," Bates said. "That's an order."

She sealed us in.

It wasn't the first time, not for me. I'd had invisible fingers poking through my brain before, stirring up the muck, ripping open the scabs. It was far more intense when Rorschach did it to me, but Chelsea was more—

— precise, I guess you'd say.

Macramé, she called it: glial jumpstarts, cascade effects, the splice and dice of critical ganglia. While I trafficked in the reading of Human architecture, Chelsea changed it—finding the critical nodes and nudging them just so, dropping a pebble into some trickle at the headwaters of memory and watching the ripples build to a great rolling cascade deep in the downstream psyche. She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.

Like so many other domains of human invention, this one had learned to run without her. Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from Production to product. Still. For me, Chelsea's skill set recast a strange old world in an entirely new light: the cut-and-paste of minds not for the greater good of some abstract society, but for the simple selfish wants of the individual.

"Let me give you the gift of happiness," she said.

"I'm already pretty happy."

"I'll make you happier. A TAT, on me."

"Tat?"

"Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I've still got privileges at Sax."

"I've been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else."

"That's ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person."

I thought about that. "Maybe it does."

But she wouldn't let it go, and even the strongest anti-happiness argument was bound to be an uphill proposition; so one afternoon Chelsea fished around in her cupboards and dredged up a hair-net studded with greasy gray washers. The net was a superconducting spiderweb, fine as mist, that mapped the fields of merest thought. The washers were ceramic magnets that bathed the brain in fields of their own. Chelsea's inlays linked to a base station that played with the interference patterns between the two.

"They used to need a machine the size of a bathroom just to house the magnets." She laid me back on the couch and stretched the mesh across my skull. "That's the only outright miracle you get with a portable setup like this. We can find hot spots, and we can even zap 'em if they need zapping, but TMS effects fade after a while. We'll have to go to a clinic for anything permanent."

"So we're fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?"

"No such thing." She grinned in toothy reassurance. "There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean."

"I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—"

She laid a fingertip across my lips. "Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn't think they should. Or—" she kissed my forehead— "if they don't think they deserve to be happy."

"So we're going for—"

"Potluck. You can never tell 'til you get a bite. Close your eyes."

A soft hum started up somewhere between my ears. Chelsea's voice led me on through the darkness. "Now keep in mind, memories aren't historical archives. They're—improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that's not to say your memories aren't true, okay? They're an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they're not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Ah," she said. "There's something."

"What?"

"Functional cluster. Getting a lot of low-level use but not enough to intrude into conscious awareness. Let's just see what happens when we—"

And I was ten years old, and I was home early and I'd just let myself into the kitchen and the smell of burned butter and garlic hung in the air. Dad and Helen were fighting in the next room. The flip-top on our kitchen-catcher had been left up, which was sometimes enough to get Helen going all by itself. But they were fighting about something else; Helen only wanted what was best for all of us but Dad said there were limits and this was not the way to go about it. And Helen said you don't know what it's like you hardly ever even seehim and then I knew they were fighting about me. Which in and of itself was nothing unusual.

What really scared me was that for the first time ever, Dad was fighting back.

"You do not force something like that onto someone. Especially without their knowledge." My father never shouted—his voice was as low and level as ever—but it was colder than I'd ever heard, and hard as iron.

"That's just garbage," Helen said. "Parents always make decisions for their children, in their best interests, especially when it comes to medical iss—"

"This is not a medical issue." This time my father's voice did rise. "It's—"

"Not a medical issue! That's a new height of denial even for you! They cut out half his brain in case you missed it! Do you think he can recover from that without help? Is that more of your father's tough love shining through? Why not just deny him food and water while you're at it!"

"If mu-ops were called for they'd have been prescribed."

I felt my face scrunching at the unfamiliar word. Something small and white beckoned from the open garbage pail.

"Jim, be reasonable. He's so distant, he barely even talks to me."

"They said it would take time."

"But two years! There's nothing wrong with helping nature along a little, we're not even talking black market. It's over-the-counter, for God's sake!"

"That's not the point."

An empty pill bottle. That's what one of them had thrown out, before forgetting to close the lid. I salvaged it from the kitchen discards and sounded out the label in my head.

"Maybe the point should be that someone who's barely home three months of the year has got his bloody nerve passing judgment on my parenting skills. If you want a say in how he's raised, then you can damn well pay some dues first. Until then, just fuck right off."

"You will not put that shit into my son ever again," my father said.

Bondfast™ Formula IV

m-Opioid Receptor Promoters / Maternal Response Stimulant

"Strengthening ties between Mother and Child since 2042"

"Yeah? And how are you going to stop me, you little geek? You can't even make the time to find out what's going on in your own family; you think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? You think—"

Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds. I peeked around the corner.

My father had Helen by the throat.

"I think," he growled, "that I can stop you from doing anything to Siri ever again, if I have to. And I think you know that."

And then she saw me. And then he did. And my father took his hand from around my mother's neck, and his face was utterly unreadable.

But there was no mistaking the triumph on hers.

I was up off the couch, the skullcap clenched in one hand. Chelsea stood wide-eyed before me, the butterfly still as death on her cheekbone.