she didn’t look like herself. Her face seemed to be boiling.”
Ildaria grimaced. She’d seen that on a turn a time or two. Usually on mortals who had acne or some other sort of scarring on their face. What young G.G. had thought was her face boiling, was the bioengineered nanos that made immortals what they were, working on removing the scarring and returning the skin to the perfect, unblemished complexion they’d been born with. It was their job. They’d been programmed with blueprints of both a mortal female and a mortal male at their peak condition, and their one directive was to return their host to that peak condition.
“Yes, but G.G. did not know that,” Marguerite said on a sigh, obviously catching her thoughts. “So he ran before he was noticed, not stopping until he was outside. I gather the neighbor found him in the front garden, simply standing, staring at nothing when Robert sent her below with her memory erased and the thought that she’d talked to Mary and had agreed to keep G.G. another day.”
Ildaria frowned. “Well, surely, once he was returned they read his mind, realized what had happened and erased . . .” Ildaria fell silent. If they’d erased the memory, he couldn’t have told Marguerite about it.
“No. They did not realize. When Mary approached G.G. in the garden, he jerked as if just waking up, and then raced away when she tried to grab his hand to take him home. He ran right out into the street, in front of a lorry. It couldn’t stop in time to avoid hitting him.”
“Oh, sweet heavens above,” Ildaria breathed.
Marguerite nodded. “I gather he barely survived the accident, and he woke up in the hospital several days later in terrible pain. Mary’s turn had finished and she was at his bedside when he woke, but he had no memory of what had happened at all the day of the accident. He did not remember what he witnessed until years later, on his eighteenth birthday when Mary explained about immortals and offered to turn him. Then it came back to him in a rush of hellish memories.” She shook her head unhappily. “Of course, he was hardly going to agree to the turn with that image in his mind.”
“Of course not,” Ildaria agreed with understanding, but asked, “Why didn’t they wipe his memory when it came back to him?”
“It is not that easy,” Marguerite said quietly. “You cannot reach in and remove something as old as that without the risk of damaging the mind.”
“But—I mean, it may have been an old memory, but he only remembered it in that moment. It was gone before that.”
“Not gone. Cloaked,” Marguerite assured her. “It was always there in his mind, though, and while he didn’t consciously recall it, some part of his mind was aware of it. Apparently, he had terrible nightmares for years after the accident. Mary thought they were because of the accident, but they were about her being an alien or pod person or some such thing.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Ildaria murmured and when Marguerite raised an eyebrow in question, explained, “It was the first movie Jess and I watched when I moved to the States. I gather it was first made in nineteen fifty . . . something, remade in the seventies, and then renamed just Body Snatchers and remade again in the nineties. It’s about these pods, from space I think, or maybe from the damage caused by pollution or something. I can’t remember, but when near sleeping humans they grow perfect replicas of them that then kill them and take over that person’s life.” She noted Marguerite’s wide-eyed expression and grimaced as she realized it didn’t really matter what had influenced his dreams about his mother. “Never mind. Go on.”
Marguerite nodded, took a moment to regather her thoughts, and then said, “At any rate, the memory was there all along, influencing him subconsciously, even if he couldn’t consciously remember it. So, trying to remove it . . .” She shook her head. “It could have damaged him terribly.” She paused briefly, and then added, “Besides, now that he knew about immortals, now that she’d explained them to him and he understood what he’d witnessed, it was a less horrifying memory.”
“But he still refused to turn,” she said, knowing that was the case, because the man was still mortal.
“Yes,” Marguerite said unhappily. “He claims he just has no wish to be immortal. He’s happy and fine being