Book I: Part 14: Alison

     ‘Oh bother,’ said Mosses Meddleson.  ‘What a nuisance.  I’m terribly sorry about this Miss Amberginnegan.  Miss Amberginnegan?’
     Alison had not heard the announcement, or at least hadn’t been paying attention to it.  The closest thing Alison Amberginnegan had ever had to an adventure was when, at the age of fourteen, she had traveled to the Orcas installation, a small artificial island in the Wetworks where she and her mother had taken pills that turned them into seals. 
     ‘Isn’t this like magic?’ her mother had said, and she had nodded, and remembered. 
     They spent six days living in the water, where everything was shocking blue.  A sense of weightlessness would overtake her on deep dives, giving her the illusion of flying.  Swimming after fish, going out into the deep to where the coastline and its skyscrapers sank below the horizon, she would surface, adrift on an endless sea, the only civilization the occasional Wetworks installation dotting the waves. 
      And then, when the six days were up, she and her mother made their way back to the Orcas installation, shed their pelts, and returned to the pedestrian life.
     ‘Miss Amberginnegan?’
     ‘What? Oh, sorry.’  She blushed and stared at her lap.  ‘How long have I just been sitting here?’
     ‘About a minute, I think.  Are you all right?’
     ‘Yes, I’m fine.  I was just … reliving a memory.’
     ‘Reliving?’  Mosses Meddleson leaned back in his chair, stroking his beard.  ‘It must have been quite an intense memory, to relive it.’
     ‘Oh, it was.  Well, not for me, that is … um….’  She stared off to the side and bit her lower lip, which quivered.  ‘See the thing is,’ she began in a voice higher than usual, ‘I have this condition?  Called Eidetic Hyperthymesia?’
     Mosses Meddleson frowned in a sympathetic way.  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Amberginnegan, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of that before.’
     ‘It means I have really detailed memories of things?  I remember everything.  I mean, everything.’
     ‘Oh, so your memory’s photographic, then?’   
     ‘Well, yeah, but that’s just the eidetic part.  I mean, I can do all the photographic memory things, like read a book and know all the words in it, or what look at a deck of cards and then recite the order back. But its more…I remember everything that happens to me, ever.  Not just facts, but things that happen to me too.  I can remember any or it, instantly.’
     ‘So, you can recall everything that has ever happened to you? In perfect detail?’
     Alison nodded, her face becoming lost within the bramble of her hair. 
     ‘Why, why that’s astonishing!’ exclaimed Mosses Meddleson. 
     ‘I suppose so.’ Alison’s voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.  ‘Everyone I tell about it tells me that.  It’s pretty normal for me, though.’
     Mosses Meddleson looked flustered.  ‘Oh, well.  Obviously.  Pardon me, I didn’t mean to be rude.’
     ‘Oh, no, I-I didn’t mean anything like that at all!’  Alison squeaked, sinking lower into her chair. 
     Mosses waved a hand in the air, as if to say ‘No, please, think nothing of it,’ and smirked knowingly.  ‘Ah, Miss Amberginnegan, what a fantastic gift you have, no doubt another gift from old Allathir.  My! Think of all the wonderful things you could do!  Why, with a mind like that, you could learn, well, everything!’
     ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, smiling.  She thought he was being a little hyperbolic.  Her hand absently began playing with her skirt.  ‘I mean, I just … I just feel lost, most of the time.  I get … confused?  Like, I hear a word, or see something?  Or smell something?  And I’m off.  Like I’m time traveling.  Reliving something I did, or read, or thought sometime.  Sometimes, the memories just keep, like, sparking other memories?  And there’s just all these things going on?  Like, like, being in a department store, in the VAST aisle? And trying to pay attention to everything at once?’
     Mosses Meddleson nodded as if he understood perfectly.  ‘Ah, a kind of sensory fugue state.’
     ‘I, I guess.  And besides, I don’t think I could learn everything, anyways.  I mean I would need forever to learn everything, right?  And I can’t do that, so….’
     For a moment, Mosses Meddleson, looked horribly, horribly shocked.  ‘You don’t?  But how, when…oh.’  He nodded to himself, and looked downwards.  ‘I see, I see,’ he said quietly, to himself, as if Alison had suddenly disappeared.  She imagined herself doing so. 
     His expression changed suddenly, as if to hide some nasty faux pas, and then he was smiling again.  Smugly this time.  ‘Oh, I object to that, Miss Amberginnegan,’ he said, ‘I object to that very strongly.’
     ‘You do?’ squeaked Alison. 
     Mosses Meddleson opened a drawer in his desk, rummaged daintily through it, then pulled out a small bottle, which he tossed lightly over to Alison.  She didn’t manage to catch it, but it landed in her lap nonetheless.  Its cap curved upwards, and there was a lining along the bottom, making it look like a miniature chalice.  The label on the side, after listing itself as the property of Mosses Meddleson, read

        STASIS 50 mg cap zenith
        QTY 60
        By Vail Hall, Dis.
        Take once a week with water.

     ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
     ‘Those are pills, Miss Amberginnegan, pills developed by your father, in fact, long ago, that prolong the human life span indefinitely.’
     There was a weird sensation in her fingers, like energy was flowing out from the bottle and paralyzing her.  ‘Really?’
     ‘Oh yes.  They halt the aging process, keeping the body at a happy equilibrium.  They prevent cancers from forming, make the body resistant to all but the gravest disease—which are all curable now, by the way, if you can afford the treatment.  Which, of course, you can.  Taking these pills, a person can remain at the height of health forever.  Why, I myself am 1066 years of age.’
     Alison started, then looked at Mosses Meddleson with new eyes.  She set the pill bottle down on the table, and tried, as much as a person can who is sitting, to back away.  Somewhere a box opened; the world shifted around her, and became very large and strange. 
     Mosses Meddleson did not seem to notice.  ‘Do you not see what you have come upon, Miss Amberginnegan?’ he said.  ‘Why, you have found a source of eternal life that you can easily afford.  In fact, you own a source of eternal life.  You can do anything.  Everything.’
     Mosses got up hurriedly and walked over to Alison, he grabbed her by the arm and drew her up out of her seat, and began guiding her towards the window.  She came, blankly, cowed by  the man before her, with his wealth, his great age. 
     ‘I had heard, but I did not believe, my girl, that things had been so, so different for you all these years!  But those days are over now!  You have entered a new world! Look!’ 
     They stood at the window, looking out over the city, the wide chasms and shadows and buildings lying below. 
     ‘The people down there, they live brief, pointless lives, with little import but the propagation of their species.  But we, Alison, people like you and me, we are part of the elect.  We are chosen, you see!  Look at them down there.  From this window, you can barely see them.  They scurry about like, like insects, while we stand above, like, well, like Magicians!  No longer must you dwell down there in the darkness, Alison.  You have been selected by fate.  You have been given a destiny.  History will be merely a record of your actions upon the world!  Everything you could wish to accomplish—why, even learning everything there is to know—you can do.  You should do.  Why you almost have to do it.  And why not do everything, when you can live forever?’
     At that moment, the voice that came from everywhere and nowhere returned. ‘Attention residents of Legacy Corps Tower One,’ it said, ‘Due to the actions of the Dread Dadalus, the Winged Anarchist, the structural integrity of this skyscraper has been weakened.  All residents on levels 1852 and above should evacuate immediately, either to a floor below, or out of the building entirely.  As this is 150 levels worth of evacuation, I think that leaving the building would be the best course.  Having a smashing afternoon.’