We stepped through sliding glass doors out onto the balcony. Two simple white chairs sat either side of a white table. The table was set with drinks and a bowl of fruit. Beyond the unfenced balcony, arid land sloped steeply away, offering an uninterrupted view of the sea. The water was calm and inviting, with the lowering sun reflected like a silver coin.
Zima indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand dithered over two bottles of wine.
'Red or white, Carrie?'
I opened my mouth as if to answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant between the question and the response, the AM would have silently directed my choice to one of the two options. Not having the AM's prompt felt like a mental stall in my thoughts.
'Red, I think,' Zima said. 'Unless you have strong objections.'
'It's not that I can't decide these things for myself,' I said.
Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky to inspect its clarity. 'Of course not,' he said.
'It's just that this is a little strange for me.'
'It shouldn't be strange,' he said. 'This is the way you've lived your life for hundreds of years.'
'The natural way, you mean?'
Zima poured himself a glass of the red wine, but instead of drinking it he merely sniffed the bouquet. 'Yes.'
'But there isn't anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born,' I said. 'My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head's like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out.' 'Let's go back to the wine for a moment,' Zima said. 'Normally, you'd have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn't you?'
I shrugged. 'Yes.'
'Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?'
'It's not that simplistic,' I said. 'If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then, yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don't. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don't want any kind of wine.' I hoped my frustration wasn't obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall.
'Then it's random?' he asked. 'The AM would have been just as likely to say red as white?'
'No, it's not like that either. The AM's been following me around for hundreds of years. It's seen me drink wine a few hundred thousand times, under a few hundred thousand different circumstances. It knows, with a high degree of reliability, what my best choice of wine would be given any set of parameters.'
'And you follow that advice unquestioningly?'
I sipped at the red. 'Of course. Wouldn't it be a little childish to go against it just to make a point about free will? After all, I'm more likely to be satisfied with the choice it suggests.'
'But unless you ignore that suggestion now and then, won't your whole life become a set of predictable responses?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'But is that so very bad? If I'm happy, what do I care?'
'I'm not criticising you,' Zima said. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, defusing some of the tension caused by his line of questioning. 'Not many people have an AM these days, do they?'
'I wouldn't know,' I said.
'Less than one percent of the entire Galactic population.' Zima sniffed his wine and looked through the glass at the sky. 'Almost everyone else out there has accepted the inevitable.'
'It takes machines to manage a thousand years of memory. So what?'
'But a different order of machine,' Zima said. 'Neural implants; fully integrated into the participant's sense of self. Indistinguishable from biological memory. You wouldn't need to query the AM about your choice of wine; you wouldn't need to wait for that confirmatory whisper. You'd just know it.'
'Where's the difference? I allow my experiences to be recorded by a machine that accompanies me everywhere I go. The machine misses nothing, and it's so efficient at anticipating my queries that I barely have to ask it anything.'
'The machine is vulnerable.'
'It's backed up at regular intervals. And it's no more vulnerable than a cluster of implants inside my head. Sorry, but that just isn't a reasonable objection.'
'You're right, of course. But there's a deeper argument against the AM. It's too perfect. It doesn't know how to distort or forget.' 'Isn't that the point?'
'Not exactly. When you recall something-this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now-there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance with reality. Yet you'd swear your recollection was accurate.'
'But if the AM had accompanied me, I'd have a flawless record of how things really were.'
'You would,' Zima said. 'But that isn't living memory. It's photography; a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination; leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered.' He paused long enough to top up my glass. 'Imagine that on nearly every occasion when you had cause to sit outside on an afternoon like this you had chosen red wine over white, and generally had no reason to regret that choice. But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white -against the judgement of the AM -and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening.'
'It might not have had anything to do with my choice of wine,' I said.
'No,' Zima agreed. 'And the AM certainly wouldn't attach any significance to that one happy combination of circumstances. A single deviation wouldn't affect its predictive model to any significant degree. It would still say 'red wine' the next time you asked.'
I felt an uncomfortable tingle of understanding. 'But human memory wouldn't work that way.'
'No. It would latch onto that one exception and attach undue significance to it. It would amplify the attractive parts of the memory of that afternoon and suppress the less pleasant parts: the fly that kept buzzing in your face, your anxiety about catching the boat home, and the birthday present you knew you had to buy in the morning. All you'd remember was that golden glow of well-being. The next time, you might well choose white, and the time after. An entire pattern of behaviour would have been altered by one instance of deviation. The AM would never tolerate that. You'd have to go against its advice many, many times before it grudgingly updated its model and started suggesting white rather than red.'
'All right,' I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. 'But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?'
'All the difference in the world,' Zima said. 'The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion.'
'Fallible,' I said. 'But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.'
'Fallibility leads to truth? That's a good one.'
'I mean truth in the higher, metaphoric sense. That golden afternoon? That was the truth. Remembering the fly wouldn't have added to it in any material sense. It would have detracted it from it.'
'There was no afternoon, there was no fly,' I said. Finally, my patience had reached breaking point. 'Look, I'm grateful to have been invited here. But I thought there might be a little more to this than a lecture about the way I choose to manage my own memories.'
'Actually,' Zima said, 'there was a point to this after all. And it is about me, but it's also about you.' He put down the glass. 'Shall we take a little walk? I'd like to show you the swimming pool.'
'The sun hasn't gone down yet,' I said.
Zima smiled. 'There'll always be another one.'
He took me on a different route through the house, leaving by a different door than the one we'd come in by. A meandering path climbed gradually between white stone walls, bathed now in gold from the lowering sun. Presently
