Звезда Пандоры

“It’s not like a TSI recording; similar I grant you, but not the same. TSI is the polished version, directed and focused. They’re made for a reason, to push your attention onto something. Ninety percent of the market has a sexual content, but there are the pure dramas, and action adventures, and tourist trips as well. It actually takes a very skilled performer, backed up by an equally skillful nerve impulse editor, to receive and filter out the impressions that the director wants and the script calls for. You access a TSI and the story is laid out for you, easy and simple, you sit back and zip through it. True memory is different, it’s whatever has caught your attention at the moment. There can be a dozen important—critical—things going on around you, and because of your prejudices, the way your personality is put together, you’re only looking at one, most likely the least important. It doesn’t even have to be visual; a sound, a smell, that could be the only recollection you have of a room, not who was in it or what they said. And try finding that room amid all the years you can recall… We can date the sections of memories which were recorded by an insert memorycell. But indexing, that’s completely different. Unless you know the exact time, you’re forced to review the whole day, or if you’re unlucky, week. And that’s where Qatux comes in. Humans have to review memory in real-time, we can’t accept it running faster than it happened. So if I wanted to look through the century which is Shaheef’s life, I would have to spend a century doing it. But Qatux with his larger brain and excellent mind, he can take the whole load in almost at once.”

“You were worried about him.”

“Yes. A hundred years is a long time. Even his brain will have a limit. And I know he’s soaked up dozens of human lives already.”

“Doesn’t that bother you, being his pusher?”

“Human ethics,” she murmured. “You can’t judge the Raiel by our standards. They don’t police their own kind the way we do. Raiel are supposed to police themselves. Qatux has made his choice, which in his society he has a perfect right to do. He’s going to get those memories anyway. If I didn’t supply them, other people will; it’s not just commercial TSI recordings you can buy within the unisphere, there are real memories to be had as well. A small specialist market. This way Qatux helps us solve the crime, everybody benefits. If we stopped him from getting them, it would be us committing the transgression as far as the Raiel are concerned.”

“Maybe,” Hoshe said. The lift was slowing again, delivering them into freefall. “I still believe this is wrong.”

“Do you want to leave the case? I won’t stop you, and it won’t read against you on your record.”

“No thank you, Chief Investigator. We’ve come this far; I’m going to see it through.”

…

From the moment it began, Rob Tannie regretted taking this job. It was all down to money of course, and his perennial shortage of it. In his current chosen profession of “field security operative” ordinary jobs were hard to find, and well-paid jobs were merely the stuff of legend. So when his agent called to offer him the contract with its fantastic payment, he should have known better. And if that wasn’t enough, the contract also had a re-life clause: he was to load his memories into a private clinic’s secure store and his anonymous employer would provide a five-year bond. If Rob didn’t reappear within five years in person to cancel it, then the clinic would go ahead with the procedure.

That told him, even if intuition and simple common sense didn’t, that sure-as-shit five years from now he’d be waking up in some freaky infant-teenage body with no recollection of the last few months of this existence. He should have walked. But it was those damn finances: some bad investments in horses and certain sporting fixtures, as well as poker and other games of chance, had left a rather large shortfall in his credit balance. He couldn’t afford not to agree, not with creditors like his, and his agent knew that. So he said yes, and expected to wind up helping some radical ethnic group strike a blow for greater cultural autonomy against their planetary government, or take part in a corporate black ops strike, or if things were really bad he could even be involved in some criminal syndicate power struggle. Naturally, with his luck, it was even worse than any of those.

Two weeks settling into his newly arranged job as a security guard at CST’s Anshun starship complex. Two boring weeks staying in character while he learned the layout, the schedules, the hardware that CST used. Getting on nodding terms with the technical teams putting the starship together. Sharing a laugh with his new colleagues about the hundreds of overeager hopefuls who arrived every day for their final stage crew interviews and assessments. Actually catching a glimpse of Nigel Sheldon himself, surrounded by his entourage of aides.