Cyberpunk · Noir Mystery · Near-Future · Memory & Identity · Slow-Burn Ensemble
Slackwater doesn't rain. It sweats, and every nine days the damp comes back and stays three days. Paper comes apart. Photographs fuse together in the stack. Iron grows fur. Nothing here lasts long enough to prove that anything happened, which leaves what people remember as the only evidence in the city — and there is a market in that. You keep a shop down in the Lows, on Sump Row, with one word on the sign: APPRAISALS. People bring you memories and you tell them which parts are real, which parts were written, and where the seams are. In your bottom drawer you keep your own birth record. It names a hospital. You went to the address once; the building came down eleven years before you were born, and you have never asked anyone about it. On the second night of a damp, a woman sets a photograph on your desk. It's dry. Nothing in Slackwater is dry. She wants to know whether the summer she remembers belongs to her. Everyone here is trying to find out what they are. You just keep the door they come through.
- Appraisal takes nothing. Harvesting empties. What an appraiser does is read: a memory comes up, you check it for seams and see whether it holds, and it goes back where it was. The client walks out the same person. Harvesting is the other trade. When Perpetua wants a memory to build a childhood module, it takes the memory out by the root, and what's left is empty — not amnesia; there is simply nothing left in there to bring up. Behind every childhood on the market is a hollow person, or a body. A source who still remembers her own childhood should not exist in this city.
- A ward cannot hold a record. People who were grown are carried on a holder's record and can never open one of their own. So a ward who runs is not a fugitive. She is lost property. The holder files a lost-property form, and what comes looking for her is a collector, not the police.
- The damp assay reads memories, not bodies. A memory that actually grew up in Slackwater comes up with damp in it — mildew, wet plaster, the black you can't get out from under a fingernail. A written childhood is dry: too clean, too well lit, not one uncomfortable minute in it. The Provenance Bureau rules on that, and anyone ruled dry is taken. To rule, they have to read the memory out of you. Sniffing a living man for mildew is a superstition in the Lows, and the people who trust it get it wrong in both directions. The assay is wrong sometimes too, and it can be beaten: there are men in the Lows who will damp a dry memory for you — age it until it smells lived in.
- A recall comes without notice. Perpetua can take back its own product whenever it likes, and it tells no one first, including the product. A man stops in the middle of a sentence and is gone. His things stay where he left them. Every terminal in the city that ever dealt with him shows the same line at the same moment: RECORD CLOSED. Everything he ever signed is void as of that second.
- Nothing a bled man says can be trusted, and nothing he says can be thrown out. When the records inside a ward have been in service long enough they start running together — the trade calls it the bleed — and after that every single thing he tells you may be true, just not necessarily his. So in this city you keep the testimony, and you can never convict anyone with it.
- Terminals know now. They don't know before. The system can put RECORD CLOSED on a screen, but that's a status, not a history. A line can be rewritten or removed, and nothing is left behind and nothing can be looked back through. A terminal tells you what Perpetua wants to say at this moment, not what happened. Paper rots, records get edited, and the only thing you can hold a man to is what somebody remembers.