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Those fears were then etched in my mother’s genome, and, like family lore, passed on from generation to generation.

They were the jewels my mother and I had hidden inside the dark box. Now that the box had been forcefully opened up, they lay exposed to bright sunlight.

Like a castle made of sand, they fell apart in the strong wind.

It was MAD. The released fragments of memory were rapidly indexed, recorded, and then erased by MAD. I understood their intent. No matter who was affected, this was the safest path. Powerful, detailed, unbearably painful memories flowed towards the future like time itself, dissolving the past.

A pang of fear seized me. The dream was perhaps the only thing in the world that connected my mother to me, the only thing that surpassed blood and familial ties, the only constant that didn’t change.

And it was now gone.

I was going to forget everything. That was how history healed itself.

 . . . three, two, one, say cheese!

In the picture, my mother looked as serious and rigid as ever, only the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. I was holding little Nuo, who had just turned one. Both of us had wide grins.

“Mom, look at you! You never smile.” I scolded her half-heartedly. After a long regimen of medicine and physical therapy, my mother was recovering well. But sometimes, her facial muscles still didn’t entirely obey her will.

“I
was
smiling. You think I was crying?” she argued.

“Look at Nuo. Now
that
’s a smile.” I played with the baby. Her lips opened in a toothless grin as she cooed.

“She’s like you. When you were little, you were just this way. Like you had no care in the world.”

“You must be remembering it wrong. I didn’t like to smile when I was little.”

“I gave birth to you! You think I wouldn’t remember that?”

My mother had changed. Her odd moods and ill temper had disappeared so completely that I questioned my memory. I could only attribute it to the demethylation treatments. She had become optimistic, cheerful, outgoing. If it weren’t for her bad legs, she would be holding Nuo twenty-four hours a day.

Maybe she wasn’t a good mother, but she
is
a good grandmother.

I was incredibly busy. While caring for Nuo, I also studied every topic related to caring for a newborn: diet, physical exercise, early mental stimulation. Every evening, I massaged her whole body with a special type of baby oil. The doctor told me that touch was one of the most important sources of sensory input for the baby’s neural development, and it was also a way to bring her and me closer.

She would not have an opportunity to erase me from her memory. The MAD had been abolished. I belonged to the last generation who would have such implants. After my death, perhaps they would build a museum to commemorate pathetic creatures like me whose skulls had been outfitted with a metal box.

The official explanation for the Catastrophe also changed. It now became harder to understand, more ambiguous. But in folklore, there were dozens of competing versions of the Catastrophe, all vivid and sensational. Sometimes, I felt as if I knew something, but then I couldn’t remember any of it. That was fine. Too many things had changed. Peopled needed time to adjust.

I hummed a lullaby, trying to get Nuo to sleep. Her breathing became even and slow. I kissed her forehead. The milky aroma mixed with the fragrance of rose smelled angelic.

From time to time, she twitched, as though dreaming of something. If I held out my finger, she would clutch it tightly.

I wanted to know if I was in her dream.

Whatever she dreamed, as long as it belonged only to her and wasn’t a repeat of someone else’s dream, even her mother’s, I imagined it was the sweetest dream possible.

What I’ve Seen With Your Eyes

By Jason K. Chapman

“So, Ms. Wei,” Detective Perez said. “Your brother was killed by a Yeti. With a knife.”

Lisa Wei glanced around the 983rd Precinct. It was a dozen desks and a five-foot-square cage crammed into an old bodega. Only five of the desks were occupied, though. That made the room feel spacious. She shifted in the cracked, plastic chair next to Perez’s desk, reaching down to slide her purse and the old gym bag underneath it. On the walls, signs and a scrolling marquee insisted that ForGen Motors had proudly sponsored the 983rd.

“That’s what I saw,” Lisa said. “A pale blue one—the Yeti, not the knife—with a unicorn horn.”

The detective nodded, but didn’t note anything on his tablet. Instead, he stared at her face. “Would you please remove your sunglasses,” he said.

She hesitated. The man had city written all over him—no ads on his clean, crisp clothes; no desperate sideways glances at the trash can. He hadn’t stood in a crowded alley at midnight waiting for the hash houses to close so he could kick and claw his way to a choice spot at the dumpster buffet. He hadn’t smiled and pretended not to notice as his older brother wiped the grime from a misshapen cupcake he’d scored from behind the bakery on his fourteenth birthday.

No. He just wanted to see the poor little exurb girl’s eyes and say, “There, but for a steady paycheck, an education, and parents who could afford to give a flying fuck, go I.” She took the glasses off and stared at him defiantly.

To his credit, he didn’t even twitch. Most city people at least showed
some
kind of reaction when they saw the glittery gold C# logo of Captain Sharp’s GhotiBurgers staring at them.

“GhotiBurgers,” he said. He pronounced it “goaty.”

“Fish,” Lisa said.

“Not really.” The detective got a sour look on his face. “They grow that stuff in a vat.” He shrugged and pointed to the wall. “That poster in the middle, below the ForGen sign. What’s it say?”

She barely glanced at it. “It’s a Captain Sharp’s ad,” she said. “GhotiNuggets are half off this week with a large soda.”

“So your eyes are net-connected.”

“Of course,” Lisa said. “That’s how FedMed works. Why? What do you see there?”

Perez glanced up at the sign. “Some cologne that’s supposed to make me rich and beautiful.”

“City ads, then.”

“How so?”

“No one tries to sell beauty to exurbs,” she said. “We can’t relate.”

It had been decades since the suburban experiment finally failed and people flocked back into the cities. They built, rebuilt, managed, and mangled, tearing down everything to set up their livable, loveable urban paradises, where the old dreams of picket fences and split-level ranches were reborn as the new ideals of sidewalk cafés and gleaming high-rises.

But the rubble had to fall somewhere.

These remade cities were ringed with rocky, exurban shoals, where the displaced and dispossessed fetched up to mingle with the shipwrecked souls who didn’t quite have what it took to make it all the way onto the island.

“I live in the Ex,” Perez said.

Lisa laughed. “No, you don’t.”

He gave her a pair of cross streets as if showing her a medal.

“That’s ex-Ex,” she said. “What do they call it? Transitional?”

“Not when I was growing up,” he said.

Lisa studied his face. Maybe he was lying. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. Whatever Ex-cred he might claim, he was an urbie, now.

Lisa was just seven years old when she learned about growing up. She huddled on her bed, an old sofa cushion shoved in the corner of a one-room apartment. She still had her own eyes then, but they were nearly useless. She clutched her old cracked-glass tablet to her chest, crying in frustration because she couldn’t read anymore.

Eddie came home from whatever teenage brothers did to keep the rent paid and the two of them fed. He crossed the tiny apartment in a dozen quick steps and sat down next to her, holding her close.

“What’s the matter, Little One?” he said.

She leaned against him. “I couldn’t read,” she said. “No matter how big I made the letters.”

“Isn’t the audio working?”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “Not like when you read to me. Or Mama.”

Eddie took a deep, shuddery breath and let it out slowly. His heart thumped loudly in Lisa’s ear. “I told you,” he said. “I don’t think Mama’s coming home.”

“I know.” Lisa wiped away a tear that was running across the bridge of her nose. “It’s because I can’t see.”

Eddie kissed her on the top of the head. “She was never very strong,” he said.

She managed a tiny smile. She knew this game. “Not like us, right?”

“Toughest pair in the Ex,” he said.

“Cuz we can do anything.”

“With nothing.”

“And like it!” they finished together.

Lisa showed Detective Perez a half smile. “Only urbies get to grow up,” she said.

“If you say so.” Perez grabbed his stylus and scrawled a quick note on the tablet. “Were you blind from birth?”

“Does it matter?”

Perez gave her a heavy sigh. He tapped his tablet. “Let’s start with the easy stuff. This is strictly for statistical purposes and has nothing to do with the investigation. Okay?”

“Why not?”

“Race?”

“Call me ish.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m told my father was Chinese-ish. I had a grandmother who was Korean-ish and a grandfather who was a black-ish Irish man. You tell me.”

“What do you identify as?”

“Is there a box for ‘mutt’?”

The detective gave her another sigh and turned the tablet face down. He frowned at the bright blue ForGen logo on the back of it before casually covering it up with his hand. “The recorder’s off,” he said.

“I never knew it was on.”

“Ms. Wei, do you know why we’re here?”

“Sure,” Lisa said. “So the police can say they tried to solve my brother’s murder.”

“They said that a week ago.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I’m with the NetCrimes division. Actually, for this and twelve other precincts, I
am
the NetCrimes division.”

She leaned forward, too, matching his conspiratorial tone. “I’m pretty sure the knife didn’t have Wi-Fi.”

“I’m investigating your brother, Eddie Wei.”

Lisa sat back and carefully kept her face blank. She’d suspected something like that when the detective had asked her to come in to the station. She stayed silent.

“Someone hacked your eye feed,” Perez went on. “They used the ad stream to map the thing you saw over the killer’s real appearance. That’s pretty sophisticated stuff.”

“I know that.”

“It’s not the kind of thing you do for a simple robbery.”

“Simple.” She sneered at him. “Thanks for your sympathy.”

He gave her another of those heavy sighs and turned the tablet back over. “Have you ever heard the nickname ‘Easyway’?”

“As in Eddie Zen Wei?”

“You tell me.”

“I live in the Ex,” she said. “There is no easy way.”

“That’s a ‘no,’ then?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s a ‘no.’ So who’s this Easyway person?”

“Just a name,” he said. “Eddie worked part-time at an electronics store for a while. That right?”

“Before it closed down,” Lisa said. “No more city stores in the Ex. And no exurbs working in the city stores, either.”

“So he was good with computers, then?”

Lisa was nine when Eddie took her to Xavier Park, three blocks from their apartment. It wasn’t a real park, like they had in the city, just an empty lot the neighborhood had adopted and named. Whatever plans the owner had had for it fell through before Lisa was born. It was just another frayed spot in the city’s ragged collar.

He took her to the middle of the lot and put on these funny glasses. Wires trailed from the earpiece to a box he held in one hand.

“You don’t wear glasses,” she said. “They look dumb.”

He leaned down, looking directly into her brand-new eyes. She’d only had them a month and still wasn’t used to how bright and clear everything was. He said, “These are magic glasses. They let me see what you see.”

“GhotiBurgers!”

He smiled. “Those, too,” he said. “But mostly, I wanted to see this.”

“See what?”

“Look up there.”

Across the street stood a five-story building with a fire escape that only reached down to the third floor. Ugly plaster scars pocked the front, exposing the building’s brick bones. Something flashed above the roof. At first, Lisa thought it was a bird, but it was too big. It flew right at them.

The winged horse swooped over the roof and dived down over the street. Its coat was brilliant white and iridescent rainbows raced across its rippling muscles. Its broad wings spread out, grabbing the air as it tilted back, seeming to hover for a moment before setting down just a few feet away.

Lisa stared at it, afraid to look away. It needed her to see it, needed her to believe. She watched it fold its wings over its back and bow to her. It was just steps away. She
had
to touch it.

“No, no,” Eddie said, holding her hand tightly. “It’s magic. If you touch it, it’ll disappear.”

“But it’s so beautiful.”

The horse bowed more deeply this time, one front hoof extended, the other knee touching the ground. Then it spread its great wings and flew away. Lisa watched until it disappeared in the distance.

“Was it real?” she said.

Eddie led her over to where the horse had stood. “Did it look real?”

“Captain Sharp looks real.”

“But Captain Sharp doesn’t leave hoof prints,” he said, pointing to deep, half-moon indentations in the dirt. “Or feathers.”

She took the white feather from him. It was longer than her hand and tiny little rainbows ran along its edge as she tilted it in the sunlight.

“It’s not all ugly out there, Little One,” Eddie said. “I just wanted you to know that.”

“Ms. Wei?”

Lisa found Detective Perez staring at her. “What? Oh. I was seven when everything finally went dark. Nine when I got the new eyes.”

“Most people spend five years on the waiting list.”

“I guess I got lucky,” Lisa said.

“Maybe so,” Perez said, smiling, “but I asked if your brother was good with computers.”

She shrugged. “I never saw him beat one.”