than that.”
Chan swallowed. Swallowed hard enough that I actually heard it. “It was supposed to be proactive,” she said. “They called it Bliss. The nanobots were intended to stay and replicate for a year, and in that year, they would proactively seek out and eliminate any negative memories. Anything bad you experienced one day would be wiped from your mind the next. After the year was up, you’d have to go get another dose.”
“Oh-kay,” I drawled the word out. “That’s a little creepy. I mean, what would trigger the ‘bad’ part of a bad memory? How bad did it have to be?” The thought of having tiny machines living in my brain deciding for me which memories I got to keep and which were swept away like so much dust and cobwebs was not a pleasant one. It sounded more like a drug—a promise of a constant high. The entire notion was enough to make my skin crawl, but it still didn’t sound like the end of the world. Just another way for the immortal rich to live on a perpetual high.
She just shrugged. “I don’t know. The data that Copeland smuggled out of Genetechnic didn’t have all the details on Bliss. But it doesn’t matter, because Bliss as a memory adjuster was abandoned when they stumbled onto two unintended side effects.”
She paused for a moment, drawing a deep, steadying breath. “From the data you found, it looks like the first one was an accident. With some people, the Bliss nanobots went too far, eliminating not just bad memories, but all memories, and then the majority of cognitive processes. They left behind a blank coil. The person, the mind, the soul that had been there was gone, as surely as our branches were destroyed somewhere near Sol.”
“That’s impossible,” I said by reflex. Sure, you could play around with memories, but there was no way to erase a core. The technology was beyond me, but it was more than just a hard drive shoved into the human brain. You couldn’t just go in and delete everything that was there.
“It shouldn’t be possible,” Chan agreed. “The safeguards built in to cores…” She trailed off, head shaking. “This goes against everything I know about how cores work, Carter. Think of it like… like… Argh! This would be so much easier if you had a grounding in computer science.” I opened my mouth, but she just waved a hand. “No, sorry. Look, think of it like using the Net. There are some places where you can upload and store data or delete data that you’ve uploaded. And other places that you can’t access, right?”
She was looking at me now, eyes intent and waiting for a response. As far as her analogy went, so far I was with her. I nodded.
“Good. Okay… at its most simplistic, you can think of a backup as two separate—but at the same time inseparable—programs. One is kind of like an operating system for… well, for you. It’s the ‘hows’ of you. How you think. How you feel. How you react to certain stimuli. It’s effectively your personality. The digitized representation of all the little things that make you who you are. The other program is… let’s call it the database of you.” She shook her head. “This is a really bad analogy, Carter,” she admitted.
“I’m with you so far,” I encouraged. “Keep going.”
“All right. So, the database side is your memory bank. It’s more than that, of course, but it’s the… the abstraction… of the chemical process that creates and stores our experiences. But, and here’s the rub Carter, these two programs… your operating system and your database? They don’t talk to each other.”
My head was starting to hurt. There was a reason I worked things like salvage and repo and not software, but it seemed to me that who you were and the memories of your experiences were irrevocably linked. “I… how’s that possible?”
“We don’t know. Not really.”
I stared at Chan, and my confusion—and the flash of anger underneath it—must have shown on my face. “I’m serious, Carter. We’re dealing with quantum entanglement and mechanics. We’ve gotten far enough to be able to use quantum computing, but we don’t truly understand the hows and the whys of it. The two programs—and remember, this is a really simplistic way of looking at this because they aren’t just simple programs, okay?—don’t have any direct interface between them. Instead, they operate on quantum entanglement, and changes to one quantum bundle affect