Afterimage | Artificial Anthology

☰StoriesAfterimage Five stories · 20350%<br>Whole anthology<br>01<br>02<br>03<br>04<br>05

EPUBMarkdown14.6k<br>Vasant Kadam had taken a sleep cabin on the Western Line because he was due at a lift inspection before seven. He woke before Dadar with the train moving beneath him, rain covering the windows, and a memory of watching his oldest friend die on Thursday night.<br>It was Tuesday. Thursday was thirty-six hours away.<br>In the memory, Vasant stood in a service shaft beneath an unfinished tower in Bandra Kurla Complex, the business district everybody called BKC. Water reached his knees. Imran lay against a pump housing with blood across his shirt. Vasant held a pistol in his right hand and a lift brake lever in his left while a woman called Saira told him to close the railway bypass or she would shoot Sarita too. He remembered the sound of the counterweight after he chose, and the pressure of the brake linkage closing on his hand.<br>An afterimage was supposed to arrive with its source intact. The recipient could remember a modelled future in detail, but would also know its date, branch number and audit signature, and would know that none of it had yet happened to the body carrying the memory. Vasant's import had all of those safeguards. Its signature said WESTERN CONCORDANCE AUTHORITY.<br>He had never agreed to receive it.<br>Vasant sat upright, struck his forehead on the lid of the cabin and felt a tender puncture behind his left ear. The other five men in the compartment stirred and complained. He knew enough about the Authority to know that it did not install memories of robberies in sleeping commuters.<br>He pushed out of the cabin and called the emergency number printed in the source tag. The automated service recognized the signature but found no appointment under his identity. It told him not to use anything he remembered and to wait for an investigator. At Dadar, Vasant saw two men in railway rain capes waiting near the end of the platform. One touched the area behind his own ear when he noticed Vasant looking.<br>Vasant turned toward the maintenance gate. His hand reached under the card reader before he had decided what to do. His forefinger found a manual catch hidden behind a rubber skirt. He pressed twice, lifted, and the gate opened.<br>He had serviced readers made by the same company, but he had never known that catch was there.<br>The second man began walking faster. Vasant ran.<br>The afterimage supplied the station as it would look on Thursday: a closed pharmacy, scaffolding beside platform five, a locked parcel lift. It was Tuesday. The pharmacy was open. The scaffolding had not gone up. The parcel lift stood unlocked with a laundry trolley inside.<br>He entered it, opened his tool roll on the floor and found the triangular service key in its cut foam recess. Every tool he owned had a place he had shaped with a knife. If one was missing, the grey outline showed him what to look for.<br>The two men reached the grille as he turned the key. One pushed a hand through. Vasant caught his wrist with the grille and folded it down in a movement he had never practiced. The man screamed. Vasant let go, closed the gate and sent the lift to the street.<br>By the time it reached the bottom, the movement belonged to Tuesday as well as Thursday.<br>He called Dr Mira Shah.<br>“Do not ask me over the phone,” she said.<br>“I have an import.”<br>“Then especially do not ask me over the phone.”<br>She gave him an address above a dental surgery in Parel and told him to bring nobody. When he arrived, his wife was already there.<br>Sarita sat in a plastic chair with a red accounting pencil tucked through her hair. She had drawn circles around three numbers on the clinic's fire certificate. Mira stood at a desk sorting blue pen caps into a steel tray.<br>“You said bring nobody,” Vasant said.<br>“I called her,” Mira replied. “You are both registered to the same unauthorized branch.”<br>Sarita looked at the wet shoulder of his shirt, then at his right hand. “Did you hurt anyone at the station?”<br>“Not badly.”<br>“In mine, you kill Imran.”<br>Vasant sat down.<br>Mira's rooms had once belonged to an orthodontist. The reclining chair remained, but its lamp now carried a source reader and a rack of fine induction needles. Mira put a blue plastic cap against the puncture behind Vasant's ear. A number appeared on the wall.<br>“The signature is valid,” she said. “The memory is not.”<br>“Those words do not go together,” Sarita said.<br>“They should not.”<br>Mira explained a splice. A legal afterimage came from a coherent model. A city, a workplace or a person was allowed to develop through a bounded future, and selected neural changes were translated into a living recipient. The simulation might be wrong, but somebody inside it had at least lived the remembered sequence.<br>A splice was cheaper. Its maker joined useful pieces from unrelated runs and signed them as one future. Skill from one branch, fear from another, a face from a third. The result could train a hand or fix a decision without...