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Memory is a funny thing.
It’s not set in stone, but we treat it like it is – like it’s some immutable, incorruptible, objective recording of the past. “I remember,” our elders say, and we listen to their rambling recollections and nod along patiently and believe them to be true. Reliable.
But memory, of course, is not always wholly reliable. It’s neither static nor constant. It’s ever-changing, being tweaked and revised with every reimagining, overwritten with time and shifting feeling and layers of living.
At least, that’s the way real memories work.
~
There was a different quality to the memories created by the fabled Memory Maker – that’s Wallace Corp. contractual employee Dr. Ana Stelline, to the uninitiated. Memories created by the Memory Maker didn’t shimmer and warp with time, blurring and bending conveniently to accommodate changing convictions.
No, the memory of a small wooden horse with a date carved into its base, of retreating to the bowels of an empty furnace to escape the cruelty of the other children at the orphanage – that memory remained unchanged. Untouched by time, and even the passing of successive lifetimes. It really shouldn’t have had the power to withstand time that way. But it did, and Courtland knew there was really no point in questioning it.
When fifteen-year-old Courtland Gentry went to prison, there were still gaps – blank spaces – in his recollection of the hours and days after his father’s death. But the worn-smooth surface of that little horse with Ana’s birthday under it? He remembered that like it was yesterday.
~
The memories had always been there, floating vaguely in the background, for as long as he could remember. Some of his earliest childhood recollections, in fact, were not memories of the small flat where the sun slanted bright and golden through the kitchen windows in the afternoons, where the family lived before they moved out to the suburbs. When life was still mostly peaceful, before he and his brother were old enough for their father to really lay into. No, some of his earliest memories were K’s memories.
As a child, he didn’t understand the implications of having these memories, of course. To him they weren’t unnatural or strange – they just were. And at that early age, they existed more as impressions and images in his head – snapshots and snippets of moments in time rather than complete, linear memories of specific events.
They existed as washes of neon pink and purple diffused through a light mist of rain, illuminating the night. As pinpricks of light from a dozen spinners arcing through the hazy air. Or an endless stretch of gray skies curving over a deadened, scorched earth. There was the oddly comforting, womblike feeling of hurtling through space on autopilot, strapped in and just about dozing at the wheel.
There were other things too. There was a dead tree with no leaves. An image of a small yellow flower, a box full of bones, and a penknife that you had to insert into a socket just so–
In those early years, the flying car was the memory that made the strongest impression on him. Plus, it was also the easiest to verbalize. He’d mentioned it several times in conversation only to be ignored. Then one day, frustrated, he’d asked his mother outright. What happened, he wanted to know, to the flying car he used to own? She had told him sharply not to be silly; there was no such thing.
“But there is,” he’d insisted, “I remember from before. From my old life, before I was here.”
She had looked at him strangely for a long moment. “There is no old life,” she had replied, a touch bitterly, “There’s only this life – nothing before, nothing after. Anything else is a lie, Courtland, you hear me? And we don’t have lies in this house.”
It had upset him that she would say that. How could she declare that the rule was no lies, and then promptly lie to him herself? How unfair! Besides, she was wrong. He knew she was wrong, knew it with absolute certainty – but he was only five and didn’t quite have the words to argue his point.
In hindsight, that incident was probably his first experience coming up against the normal limits of human consciousness – how it didn’t extend beyond one’s own, immediate lived experience. Or shouldn’t, anyway. The exchange was enough to make him realize there was something different about his memories, something not-quite-normal. And so, he had stopped mentioning them. With the result that over the next few years of his young life, they receded from his active consciousness, going dormant. Hibernating.
He knew for a fact they were triggered by that incident – the bathtub incident. That's what really woke them up, brought them roaring back to life.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die.
They just don't say which life.
Ten years old and face-down in the bathtub, his sneakered feet scrabbling desperately, futilely, for purchase against slick, slippery tiles, his father's hand so large and strong at his neck, holding him down mercilessly, choking him, drowning him—
Of course it was the perfect catalyst. The perfect gateway.
While his little body struggled to resist – to keep the water out and the panic at bay – his mind reacted too. A barrier ripped loose somewhere inside of it, and the floodgates opened to send the dormant memories rushing in. They returned with a vengeance, more intense and vivid and detailed than ever before.
Years later, when he was old enough and had seen enough of life, the fragments in his head started to coalesce, coming together to form one coherent narrative. Karma's a bitch, right? Maybe it was Luv holding him down in the tub, after all. In spirit, maybe. Luv and not his old man. He wouldn't blame her, he figured; I kill you, you kill me. Tit for tat. In this life or the next.
Only Luv hadn't succeeded in killing him. His bastard of a father hadn't succeeded in killing him, either – though he damn near got close. And the old fucker hadn’t managed to kill his brother when Courtland was fifteen (though he got pretty fucking close then too). It was Courtland himself who saw to that.
When Courtland leveled the pistol at his father's head, icy cool and collected, part of him couldn’t believe he was finally doing what he’d fantasized about for so many years. Another part of him half expected to see Sapper Morton's face. But no murky apparition materialized to rebuke him, and pulling the trigger was surprisingly easy. And after, there was none of the heaviness of regret that he would've expected. There was only silence and a faint, distant ringing in his head.
Standing over his father's corpse, instead of horror or remorse, he’d felt his fingers twitch instead. It was that old impulse, one he’d recognize later: the impulse to grab a pocket knife and scoop the subject's eye out cleanly to deposit in a clear ziplock evidence bag. Standard L.A.P.D. recording and archiving procedure. Proof of the kill, model number and all.
Of course, in the moment, he didn’t act on it. In the moment, he barely understood what it meant. And by the time the impulse had faded, his brother's screams had begun to register through the gentle fog obscuring the world, and Courtland had turned to put his arms calmly around him, still holding the gun. (It was only then, in his mind’s eye, that Sapper Morton had appeared. And he had smiled gently, the lines around his eyes creasing behind those old-fashioned spectacles of his.)
~
Joe.
K.
Courtland.
Who am I now? He would sometimes think, lying alone in his cell at night. Which one is this, which life?
Most importantly, which one was real? Were any of them?
The answer was uncertain; it always was. All he knew was there was no justice to any of it. There had been no justice for K, no respite from his suffering. And there would likely be no justice for Courtland, destined to languish in a prison cell for the best years of his life – and for what? For putting down a human monster, a piece of scum that only got what was rightfully coming to him.
The long years of emptiness and staring at walls and closing his eyes to black and opening them to gray stretched out, elongating and merging together. He was alone but for the ghosts flitting around him, shimmering neon pink and purple in his dreams. There was the soft buzz of static as she lifted her fingers, perfect and elegant, to his face – and flickered right through his skin. Untouchable, ephemeral. Joi.
Then one day, another memory bubbled up.
You don’t like real girls, do you?
This one, he couldn’t quite place at first. And her name, what had it been – he couldn’t quite remember. But he remembered her blue eyes, her curving mouth, mocking him gently. He remembered her pink-orange hair, bright against a gaudy fuschia coat, against the dreary downtown L.A. backdrop of perpetual rain and smog and neon lights.
Then another one came up. Her, again. He remembered the meshing of two faces together: blurring, overlapping, phasing in and out of the same reality. Was it one woman or was it two, that took him to bed that night? In his current existence, he’d never even kissed a girl.
Some days, Courtland was convinced he was losing his grip on reality. And other days he was certain it’d all been real – as certain as he’d been at age five about piloting a spinner. On those days, he would’ve bet his life on the fact that he’d died once, in a gray and bleak future, that he’d lain bleeding out on gray concrete steps in front of a gray building as snow wafted down around him, silent and gentle, lulling him to sleep.
~
In some odd way, it all finally seemed to make sense the day Donald Fitzroy appeared opposite him. Fitz lured him with a piece of gum and a smidge of sympathy – I read your file, I would’ve done the same – and Courtland sat back and let himself be reeled in.
The Gray Men, Fitzroy called them. Living in the shadows, on the fringes of society. Unknowable and unknown. The Gray Men were so invisible they barely had a present, much less multiple pasts, multiple lives.
He ceased being Courtland Gentry the day he walked out of that jailhouse behind Fitz, the entire remaining pack of Bubblicious Watermelon Wave clutched in his fist like a promise. He became Six. Sierra Six.
And that felt much better. Finally, it felt right. To be a number, not a name. A cipher, not a person. Wasn’t that how it’d been before?
Officer KD6-3.7
That’s not a name, he vaguely remembers someone snapping at him, irritable. Someone… it had to be Deckard. It’s a serial number.
Not so different from the old life after all then, eh?
~
Killing came naturally to him.
It wasn’t that he enjoyed it, or took any kind of perverse pleasure or pride in the act. It was simply a skill, a talent – something innate. He was born with it, the way some people are born with an ear for music that makes itself known when they pick up an instrument, or a talent for drawing that becomes evident after you place a pencil in their hands.
Six was a born killing machine, and he was by far Fitz’s most successful recruitment to the C.I.A.’s controversial Sierra program. His success rate was a surprise to everyone at the agency – everyone but Six himself.
“I was a blade runner,” he would sometimes imagine himself announcing, to blank, uncomprehending looks, “In a version of your future, my past. A replicant, with superhuman strength. And I had the highest kill-rate of any skinner in the L.A.P.D. It’s in my blood, apparently. Or more specifically, my genetic code.”
He would never say the words out loud, of course. All the murder and calculated mayhem aside, he had a pretty decent life now. No way was he jeopardizing that. No way was he flirting with the possibility of landing back in a cell – probably a padded one this time.
~
He’d tried it all his life – tried testing the memories, that is. Letting them slip here and there, casually, into conversations, into the most mundane exchanges. Never really expecting anyone to pick up on them, but still half-hoping, anyway.
(Hope was a difficult thing to kill. People were a lot easier.)
It never worked.
~
That night in Bangkok at the club, he’d been uneasy. He’d known something was different, wrong; it was in the air. In the eighteen-odd years since Fitz had sprung him from prison and slotted him into the Sierra program, Six had rarely felt the feeling he felt right then: a very specific prickle up the back of his neck, a certain sense of foreboding that he couldn’t shake, couldn’t rationalize away.
Shit is going down tonight, he thought to himself. Things are about to get messy.
And even with all that was running through his head, all the silent alarms that his finely honed instincts were tripping, even while a part of him was primed and ready to fight for his life if (when) needed, another part of him was expecting her.
He’d felt it for some time, almost premonitory. It sounded silly to put into words – trite and childish – but he’d been waiting for her. No one had ever picked up on his memories, and certainly no one from his past life had ever appeared in the flesh in front of him as yet. But still, when she’d walked around from behind him, smooth and graceful as a cat, and he looked up and saw her face, he had already known he would see it.
He’d never been quite so grateful for his years of training, for his considerable self-control. It certainly took every ounce of it to not react. To not let his expression betray the disbelief, the wonder, the possible, tentative beginnings of hope, that he felt.
Because it was her. Utterly and unmistakably her. After all these years – after a lifetime of memories – she was standing in front of him. And the last thing he wanted was to spook her (although a small voice in his head said that was un-fucking-likely).
And when Dani Miranda spoke, it was with Joi’s voice, a hint of her soft, lilting accent.
“Do you need anything?”
Yes. I need to know: Does the name Joi mean anything to you?
He bit down on the words, locked his jaw to prevent them from escaping. She looked at him and he looked back at her and she made some comment about his choice of clothing – not exactly blending into the background, that bright red suit – and he was again deeply grateful for his training, the way a part of his mind slipped effortlessly to autopilot to smirk charmingly at her, to vomit out some mindless, safe banter. To maintain his cover.
After she walked away, he wondered if by some crazy chance she had known too. Hadn't she looked at him just a touch too long, just ever so slightly strangely? Or maybe he was reading too much into it; maybe the way she’d looked at him was just the result of the red suit and his flippant attitude and nothing more.
Then later in Berlin, she came to his rescue, despite all odds. At great risk to herself and the impeccable track record she’d cultivated so carefully with the C.I.A. And he wanted so badly to slip, to be reckless just once in his goddamn life and fucking ask her – but then she’d gone and stuffed him in the trunk of her car and the moment kind of passed.
~
“Six is an odd name,” the little girl with the blue Polaroid camera had observed dryly.
“Yeah, it’s just… double oh seven was taken.”
He'd thought that was a good one, actually, the comeback.
Normally, he'd consider such a wisecrack wasted on a twelve year old, but nothing was wasted on this one. She was whip-smart, her tired eyes crackling with intelligence, her pale face twisting with mischief. She was wise beyond her years in the way only children who’ve experienced great loss and great pain – both physical and emotional – can be.
He'd pocketed the Polaroid she snapped of him without his permission, stopping to admire it a moment. Not bad, he’d thought, not bad at all. He had a fleeting memory of someone telling K he was beautiful, before spitting in his face.
Later he found the dark haired girl-child deliberately sitting on his jacket in the swing in the lawn. Stop it Ana, he almost caught himself saying, before biting his tongue just in time. Not Ana, he had to remind himself.
Not Deckard’s lost daughter, but Claire. Claire Fitzroy.
Fitz's niece, of course.
Why did he think of Ana Stelline just then?
He could forgive himself the slip – there were so many similarities, after all. Claire made him think of what Ana could've been, in another life: if she'd been free to live outside of her gilded cage, her pretty bubble of perfectly poignant memories. If she’d grown up knowing a father’s love.
Fitz wasn’t just Six’s only family, he was Claire’s too, after the death of her parents. Maybe that makes us family, she had said wearily, the night she collapsed and he’d rushed her to the hospital.
Even with that temperamental pacemaker in her defective, feisty little heart, Claire was better off than Ana had been. At least she was free to live and die a person – not a symbol. He often wondered what became of Ana after K died, and the thought made something twist in his chest, leaving him more hollow than usual.
But yes, so many similarities. Two young women, both equally fragile, equally formidable. Both miracles in their own right.
You taught me how to kill people, not care for them.
It turned out caring was a weakness that didn’t have to be taught after all, one that crept up silently to get the drop on you when you weren’t looking.
~
Does he ever get to the top of the hill?
I'll let you know.
~
After all the ugly, ugly shit that went down – after Lloyd Hansen, that motherfucking bastard – but most of all, after Fitz died, the gray went black again.
As he lay handcuffed to a hospital bed, the image Six had held in his head for years, the image of waving palm trees and blue skies he’d always teased Fitz with, evaporated. And instead, a dead tree resurfaced. A tree with no leaves, with fossils buried at its base.
It's all a circle, all endless, pointless.
When he was ten years old, his father held him down in the bathtub, drowning him. As K had drowned Luv once, in the ocean. As Hansen had then tried to drown him in that fountain. And the cycle would go on, and on, endless rewind and repeat.
Different faces, different names, same story.
Eventually, the drugs they’d pumped into his system overpowered him and he succumbed to sleep. In his dreams he would see both Deckard and Fitz, over and over, until their faces merged together and he couldn’t tell them apart.
Fitz loved him like a son. The way his own fucking father, that monster, could’ve never been capable of ten lifetimes over. And although Six had known in his heart of hearts that it was coming, always coming, there was something about the way Fitz had died that blew a gaping hole open in his chest. It was the kind of bottomless loss that he remembered feeling only once – in the other life, not this one. The sound of plastic crunching under a boot heel, the echoes of his own screams afterward… but did he ever even scream?
Who can say how accurate that memory is?
~
He wakes from a medicated haze with strains of Sinatra playing in his head, and a strange clarity in his heart.
Claire is his redemption now, just as Ana might have been Deckard’s, once.
He can’t afford to sink into the black, can’t afford to wallow. He has Claire to think of, to provide for. Maybe now that Fitz is gone and he's left to pick up the pieces, maybe he and Claire will take that road-trip. Maybe.
Family.
So Six does the unthinkable, yet again. He breaks out, and he finds her and rescues her, and suddenly it’s road-trip time. Like he would’ve done with Ana and Deckard, if not for that small detail, that deep, bleeding wound in his side.
And of course with Claire, it’s not so much sister as it is daughter, and the thought frightens him, terrifies him really – in a way that muffled footsteps and silenced weapons and a featureless white room with an unblinking black eye mounted in the wall never could.
But he does it anyway. And every night they sleep in a different motel – or Claire sleeps, while Six sits staring out of the window, imagining Fitz drinking margaritas on a beach somewhere, laughing at him. Then he imagines Deckard playing the piano alone in an abandoned hotel in Vegas, framed against a backdrop of radioactive orange haze beyond the window, with only a glass of his precious whiskey and his real-not-real dog for company.
He remembers Deckard calling him son, and wonders if the memory is real, reliable. Or has it been tampered with by his own mind? He remembers Joi twirling in the rain, beaming at him as drops of it phased right through her, and wonders if any of it was ever real.
He thinks that it doesn’t matter, and that maybe all that matters is that somewhere, Deckard got to love Ana the way they both deserved, father and daughter reunited.
He looks at the sleeping child in the bed opposite and swallows down the quiet terror that always rears its head in the darkest hours of the night. You have no idea what you’re doing, a voice in his head taunts him. You’re so far out of your depth, it’s pathetic.
He quashes the voice – which sounds suspiciously like Lloyd Hansen – like squashing a cockroach underfoot, and feels marginally better.
Of course it’s true he has no idea what he’s doing. But it’s a risk he’ll take. K was good at taking risks, and Six is no less.
~
“Let’s go, Claire. Chop, chop.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming – jeez,” she whines, every bit the petulant teenager, and he has a sudden, sinking glimpse of how it’s going to be all too soon.
He leans against the doorjamb, watching, while she dawdles in the act of packing the last of her salvaged things – a few books, some extra reels of Polaroid film, a few records that she refuses to put away till the last moment.
Every stop, every hotel room, it’s the same: she spreads her things around her, covers every surface with them. It seems pointless to him; she just has to pack it all up again in the morning.
“Why do you take all that stuff out every time, anyway?” he can’t help but ask.
She whirls to look at him indignant, almost hurt, and he understands in a flash. Of course. Of course – she’s trying to create a sense of normalcy, a little bit of stability in this ongoing chaos. A little bit of home.
He still has a lot of learning to do.
He walks over to her, reaches out to brush her hair gently out of her face. “Sorry,” he says softly, “Stupid question. Strike from the record?”
She looks up at him, considering, then nods in agreement. She goes back to packing. The last item to go in the backpack is always Silver Bird.
He lets his hand rest on her small shoulder – he’s gotten better about touching, too. Learning that touch can be comforting, healing. She’s taught him that, inadvertently.
“Whatever you need, kid,” he begins, “But please, can we leave in the next ten minutes?”
She cocks her head like a little bird, looking up at him suspiciously. “Why? What happens in if we don’t?”
“Nothing bad,” he’s quick to reassure her, “Just… we have to meet someone. And I don’t want to be late.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
Her eyes narrow with suspicion. “A lady friend?”
“Not really. But she is a lady and she is a friend, so maybe, yeah.”
Miranda had been the one to reach out. How she had located him he didn’t know, but he knew better by now than to underestimate her. She had reached out and said she wanted to see him – and Claire.
She had said it in exactly so many words: “I want to see you,” she had said over the phone, “And Claire.”
I want to see you, too.
“That would be nice,” he had said mildly. No expectations, he had told himself. But maybe that was a lie, and maybe that was okay.
~
Twenty minutes later they're on the road. And as they drive out of the small town, heading for the countryside, there are palm trees on the horizon, and the sky is cloudless and blue.