Children of the New World: Stories Read Online Free PDF

journal in her bag. “Sure,” she said. “Show me your memories.”
    *   *   *
    CYNTHIA KEPT ME out of the office that weekend. It’d been a long time since I’d been with anyone, and never with someone like Cynthia. When we lay in bed together, I could feel the loneliness of my previous life, filled with computer programming and take-out containers, giving way to the happiness of a future together. In short, I was falling in love.
    I called in sick Monday and stayed in bed with her, afraid that if I left, she’d disappear. It was the first time in months that I didn’t work on constructing memories. Instead, I let my mind fill with details of her: what her lips felt like, the timbre of her voice when she said my name, the way morning spread across the bedroom.
    When I finally returned to work on Tuesday and told the guys, I got ribbed by Quimbly. “So that’s what happens when you get laid? You stop showing up?” I shrugged and blushed. “Thought you’d both left me,” he said. “Barrett’s lost in the Bible.”
    Barrett was sitting by his computer with his head down, the golden-rimmed pages of a King James on his desk. He’d found his niche with religious experiences. “What are you doing?” I asked him.
    “Shhh…,” he said darkly, and didn’t look up.
    “He’s writing Sunday sermons now,” Quimbly said. “Turns out folks are just as happy thinking they’ve been to church than actually going. Barrett, put that fucking Bible down, we’ve got something serious to talk about.” Barrett raised a bloodshot glare from the book before marking the page and rising.
    We’d gotten our first complaint. A tech-savvy grad student had intentionally gone seeking the edge. He’d tried to remember driving to the border of the Mexican town we’d created for spring break and had run into the white light. His blog posts were already circulating the Internet.
    “We haven’t been designing tight enough memories,” Quimbly said.
    “The kid went searching,” I said defensively; it’d been my memory. “We can’t control where our users go.”
    “Maybe not, but we can test each other’s memories,” Quimbly said. “From now on, before we release anything for sale, you go into Barrett’s memories, he goes into yours, and both of you go into mine. You test out the edges. Search every alleyway, open every door, drive as far as you can. You find the edge of a memory, you fix it. Go ahead and test at home if you want, just make sure you log every beam.”
    “And what are you going to do?” I asked.
    “I’m the control group,” Quimbly said. He promised to watch over us and hold our memories straight. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll keep your brains from getting fried.”
    *   *   *
    THE PROBLEM WITH testing memories was that after enough beams, it became impossible to recognize the difference between authentic memories and beamed ones. Had I really fought in Afghanistan? Cynthia was lying next to me in bed, reading a book. It was one of her things—she read actual books. Where she found them, I have no idea. But there she’d be, pillows propped behind her head, reading a novel word by word, page after page, taking endless hours when she could’ve had the thing memorized in minutes.
    “Did I ever fight in Afghanistan?” I asked.
    “You weren’t born yet,” she said dryly.
    “How about Bermuda?”
    She lowered her book onto her knees and shook her head. “The last place you actually went was your parents’ house for Thanksgiving.”
    It was February. I tried to remember back to November, the dinner with my parents, but it seemed less real than my memories of the tropics. “Are you sure?” I asked.
    She raised her book. “Yeah, I’m positive. You’ve got to stop beaming.”
    Cynthia was vegan and almost entirely anti-tech. She was devoted to causes like buying back land for Native Americans and safeguarding water rights for third world countries. Though I supported her