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He loves being on Molokai—perhaps because it is the unloved sibling of the Hawaiian island chain. Once a leper colony, now just a curiosity, it’s the home of a huge compound owned and maintained by Proactive Citizenry. The cliffside mansion, Cam has learned, is only a part of the compound. Like everything else about the organization, its sphere of influence extends far beyond first impressions.
“You’re not eating, Cam,” Roberta says as she comes out to join him across the table. Roberta—his creator, or builder—whatever term one gives to the individual who conceived of you. Perhaps, then, it should be “mother,” though he’s loath to use the word.
“I was waiting for you.” He looks at the unappetizing appetizer before him. “And anyway, I have too few fans of foie gras in my internal community. I’ll wait for the prime rib.”
“Suit yourself.”
“If I could suture self, I wouldn’t have needed you.”
She gives him a weak Ha-ha roll of her eyes and begins to daintily manipulate the unpleasant-looking duck liver onto her crostini. As he recalls, to cultivate foie gras, ducks are force-fed until they’re morbidly obese, and their livers swell to near-exploding. Such wonderful tricks the human race has learned! Cam returns his gaze to the sea.
“General Bodeker is preparing quite the welcome for you at West Point next week.”
“No speeches I hope?”
“Only informal. Toasts at meet-and-greets. He’ll be out in a few days to brief you on the details.”
“Why can’t the military just tell people things?” Cam says. “Why must they brief?”
“I thought you, of all people, would appreciate linguistic formality.”
“Don’t you mean ‘you of many people’? It would be beyond hyperbolic to suggest I am made of all people.”
Cam’s impending West Point experience—his entire life, it seems—has been spelled out for him. He’ll be whisked through officer training, all the while posing for photo ops, and becoming the “Face of the Modern American Military,” whatever that means. He hated the idea at first, but he’s had a pronounced change of heart.
He must admit, the formal dress uniform looks great on him. It makes him look important. Part of something greater than himself. He imagines all the high-level people he’ll brush elbows with—not just as a novelty, but as a proud officer of the United States Marine Corps—for they said he could choose his branch, and he chose the Marines. He thinks of his glorious future, and he’s overjoyed. Yet not.
He finally turns his gaze from the ocean. “Let’s talk about the person you’re making me forget. Let’s talk about the girl”
Roberta finishes her foie gras, unfazed. “You know I won’t discuss it, so why ask?”
“Because the closest I’ll ever come to remembering is forcing you to remember.”
Their server comes to take away the appetizers, and brings the prime rib. Cam finds he’s hungry for it, but not hungry enough to start right away. “I can still feel the worm in my brain.”
“It’s not really a worm. It’s just a clever bit of nanotechnology, and anything you’re feeling is just in your imagination.”
He begins to cut his meat, imagining how his piecemeal brain has been routed by the army of microscopic nanites crawling along his axons, leaping between dendrites, all tuned to seek out very specific memory patterns. The moment his conscious thought hits upon the targeted memory, it gets zapped. No mess, no bother. For the first few days after the procedure, Cam was plagued with that tip-of-the tongue feeling, reaching for a name and a face he thought he remembered a moment ago, but was then gone. The feeling has lessened, but the nagging sense of absence has remained. Well, not entirely. Because the nanites are also designed to tweak his pleasure receptors whenever he thinks of anything relating to the military. It’s been filling the gaps like spackle in a cracking plaster wall.
It’s the peripheral things he still knows that make it so difficult to leave his past life behind. He knows he was in Akron. He remembers helping Connor Lassiter, but the details are fuzzy. Cam also knows he chose to become a hero to The Girl, rather than be a hero to Proactive Citizenry. He could have turned them all in and done the nation a great service that would insure his place in history . . . but The Girl would hate him for the rest of his life if he had done it. So he chose to be a hero to her in a way that would outshine anything that Connor had ever done. And then maybe . . . maybe . . . when she tired of the Akron AWOL, she would see the purity of what he had done for her. And The Girl would love him. Cam chose the long play and was willing to wait. But now, he can’t remember her face, or her name, or anything about her. He never imagined she could be stolen from the inside out.
“Is the prime rib to your liking, Cam?”
“It’s fine.”
“Just fine?”
“It’s excellent. Must you always make inquiries of my taste buds?”
Roberta sighs. “Cam, please, I don’t want to fight. It’s our last week together. I want it to be pleasant.”
“You’re not coming with me?” Not that he wants her to, but as his “handler” in all public matters, he had just assumed she would.
“No one wants a doting mother at West Point,” she says.
That catches Cam by surprise. Apparently it catches Roberta by surprise as well. A slip she didn’t intend to make. It’s the first time she’s ever actually used the M word. Cam always felt theirs was a distorted parental/child relationship, but use of the M word has always been an unspoken taboo.
Roberta clears her throat and dots her lips with her napkin. “Besides, there’s too much work to do here once you’re gone.”
