and blessedly unobtrusive. I sighed as I pulled it on, cinched it tight at the waist, and stepped back into the room.
Chan had not moved from the perch she’d taken since our return to the hotel. She sat in front of the room’s console, leaning slightly back in her chair, eyes unfocused and staring, seemingly, into nothing. A laser array, produced from some dark corner of her bags—which, it turned out, were stuffed full of various hardware and very little in the way of clothing—sat on the table before her. The item I’d taken from Copeland’s sleeve hung suspended in the middle of the laser array, a metal cube being struck from all sides by focused light. I still didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was clear to me that it was some sort of data storage device.
I didn’t want to distract her, so I made my way to my bunk and slouched down into it. My Gauss pistol sat on the nightstand next to the bed, plugged into an electrical outlet to replenish the charge on its battery. I had already loaded a fresh magazine. Sarah, remind me to get more ammunition for the Gauss pistol. My agent issued a ping of acknowledgment.
That done, there was little left for me to do but lean my head back against the yielding softness of the pillow, close my eyes, and slip off into sleep.
* * *
“Motherfucker.”
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep, but the low, staggeringly sincere curse cut through my dreams like a laser. I lurched into wakefulness, my hand darting to the nightstand and fumbling for the Gauss pistol before I realized that the voice belonged to Chan.
“Dammit, Chan,” I mumbled. I did a quick check of the time. According to my implant, I’d been out for about three hours. The pain in my arm and leg had gone from a heavy burn to a dull, throbbing ache. It was a good sign, and an improvement, but somehow that dull ache almost felt worse.
“Sorry.” She sounded distracted.
The room was shrouded in shadow. Full dark had fallen while I slept, and Chan hadn’t bothered turning on any lights. The laser array before her still glowed, giving just enough faint red light for me to see that she still sat at the console, no longer leaning back in the chair, but hunched over the table, head bowed. “You okay?” I asked. I pinged the room’s network as an afterthought, bringing up the lights to about half-power.
“No,” Chan said. “I don’t think any of us are going to be okay.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at Chan’s back, and the silence grew like a chasm between us. I’m not sure how long it lasted, probably no more than a few seconds, but the fear in Chan’s statement made it feel much, much longer.
“What is it, Shay?” I asked. I kept my voice low, calm, sensing that whatever she had learned, Shay Chan was on the very edge of losing it.
She was quiet a long time. Her mouth opened more than once, then closed again as she struggled to find the right words. Finally, she said, “It was supposed to be a good thing, a tool to help people.
“Genetechnic… they created nanobots designed to actively seek out and remove certain memories from a person.”
On the face, that sounded bad, sure, but people had been having selective memory editing done for the better part of a century. With lifespans theoretically as near to immortal as technology could make them, everyone had a few memories tucked away that they would rather live without. I had never had it done, but I was probably in the minority. With the outer shells being replaceable, all we really had were our memories. I didn’t like the idea of some drug or medtech getting their dirty fingers in mine. It had taken me a while to actually like the person that I was, and who knew which of those memories—good or bad—made that possible? The procedure generally involved a long stay in a med center and a lot of highly sensitive hardware. If Genetechnic could do it with a nanospray, they were poised to make billions, maybe trillions, of credits.
Which in no way explained Chan’s reaction. Some people had a certain unease with the entire thought of deleting portions of their mind, but the practice was widely accepted. “There’s got to be more to it