“I’m here to volunteer for Project R.A.B.B.,” he said again.

  “I’m well aware of that. However…”

  “I know there are risks. Sharkey told me. I don’t care.”

  “But we care, Mr. Cody.” The man sat back, considering. “In its present stage of development, Project Rockabye Baby is one of the most exciting and most dangerous discoveries we’ve ever come across. The potential for its misuse is enormous. Brainwashing in the truest sense of the word. We’re looking for safeguards against that. We’re trying to find a way to trigger the regeneration process so that it focuses only on specific area.” He flashed a sudden smile. “Imagine the possibilities—total body rejuvenation—the ultimate eternity elixir. We can live forever, rebirthed over and over…but we must find a way to keep the…tapes, so to speak, from being erased.”

  “Memories.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Meyer’s brief effervescence was reined back under scientific control. “We are only beginning to understand the ramifications of this kind of loss. Seemingly trivial matters…every experience of your life, from birth, no matter how deeply buried in your mind, is still vivid if tapped by the right probe. These experiences constitute the fullness of one’s personality. At present we must forfeit the one for the other.”

  Cody felt a coolness at the back of his neck. “Is that why they commit suicide?”

  Meyers reconnected the tips of his fingers, closing floodgates. “We are studying the…side effects, the emotional trauma involved. It’s much more complex than simple amnesia. Subconscious memories are also erased. Everything must be replaced.”

  “They trade a mind for a body and forget what living was for,” Cody said.

  “We’re trying to rectify that.”

  “How?”

  “If you qualify for the program you will be told.” The man took several papers from a drawer and placed them in front of Cody. “We’ll need your permission to obtain your medical records.” He pointed to places for Cody’s signature.

  “There’s a hand brace with a pen attached in my backpack,” Cody said, reading over the papers. In minutes his quivery scrawl would set him on a path he was not sure he was ready to explore. Still, he was certain of his future as it was now. He adjusted the pen with his teeth and signed.

  The testing took almost two weeks. Cody felt physically drained and brainpicked. He was homesick, to his surprise, and became incensed when he was not allowed to call Fielding and Bushnell, just to talk. He asked for some art supplies and began sketching, desperate to escape into his nameless bliss if even for a few minutes.

  “If I pass,” he asked Meyers one afternoon while the doctor took another blood sample, “I mean, if I qualify for this, and it works, will I lose my art?”

  “We can give you art instruction to try to replace what is lost. Beyond that I can’t answer. The creative process is a largely unknown area. It tends to be a right brain function. We find that left brain functions are much more easily replaced.”

  “You mean I might not be able to draw afterwards?”

  “We don’t know. You may have a genetic predisposition toward art. Emotional inclination is another matter. No one fully understands the need to create—what drives one man to paint, another to compose music, another to break the world record for flagpole sitting. Whether you re-establish your artistic direction is an unknown. Attempting to replace twenty-seven years of life in a year’s time is an arduous task.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “No.”

  Cody thought about not being able to draw. There was irony in the situation, he knew. Had he never lost the use of his body, his body would probably have been the only part of him he would have developed. He might have gone back to the oil fields, doing blue collar labor, the only job he’d ever held prior to becoming gunner’s mate in the Navy. He wondered if he would ever have discovered his artistic ability. No. He would have bowled maybe, and gotten a beer belly, and…would he have ever attempted college? Where would his ambitions have led, he mused, had life not played such an ultimate joke, making him whole in halving him, separating his mind from his body?

  “Why can’t I see Sharkey?”

  “Security reasons.”

  “Does he sing in the shower anymore?”

  Meyers withdrew the needle from Cody’s arm. “Not to my knowledge.”

  He qualified. He sat at the long table ringed with white-smocked doctors and scientists and listened as they explained the procedure and the risks involved, should he consent to become a part of the project. It sounded magical, he thought—a deep sleep of approximately six weeks, wired up to a multitude of machines designed to serve as his surrogate mother. He would rest in a kind of fetal position in a black box that looked more like a coffin, he thought, when they showed it to him.

  They gave him two weeks to make a decision, longer than they had given Sharkey, and sent him home with a tape recorder.

  “Should you decide to participate in the project,” Meyers told him, “you’ll have three weeks to place whatever memories you want to keep, on tape. Anything you wish to preserve.” He paused. “A word of advice—you’d best make it a mixed bag.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t select only good memories. The negative also serve a purpose. One more thing…your friend—John Sharkey—”

  Cody waited for the words that would confirm what he had suspected for the last several days. Meyers looked upset. Guilty.

  “He’s dead,” the man said finally. “He died two days ago.”

  “How?”

  “He took a motorcycle and ran it into a wall. I’m…very sorry.”

  “Not enough memories?”

  Meyers looked at him. “Perhaps. Maybe…just not the right memories.”

  At the house Bushnell and Fielding and Wilson watched him as if he were an impostor they were sure to catch in a mistake eventually. He knew he was making everyone feel awkward. He couldn’t concentrate on his artwork. Everything seemed out of kilter, as if he had returned from a trip to a distant galaxy and nothing was quite as he had left it, but he couldn’t figure out what was changed. He was changed. What he knew had changed him. That had to be it. He didn’t want to tell them that Sharkey was dead. That would lead to more questions than he was prepared to answer. Instead, he sat in his room for hours at a time, running memories onto cassette tapes. Adam had to go out and buy more. They didn’t ask what he was doing in his room with the door closed, talking to himself. They didn’t ask him anything at all.

  Cody tried to organize his memories systematically, in chronological order, reaching back to his earliest childhood. He talked about everything he could think of, including his fear of The Thing Under The Bed and how his mother had taught him to give it a name and the fear had gone away. Ralph-Under-the-Bed became a bedtime game. He didn’t know if the memory was trivial, but it was his and he wanted to keep it. He remembered how his mother had read to him, the crushed ice and 7-Up when he had the mumps, the blanket tent in the back yard, the…it went on and on. The more he thought, the more there was to remember.

  He called his mother up to tell her he loved her and she asked him what was wrong. His sudden nostalgia frightened her. Tapes mounted up. He talked until he was hoarse. In the middle of dinner he would think of something that was totally out of chronological order but he was afraid he wouldn’t remember it later, so he zipped back to his room to record it while he had it. Memories came in disorganized clumps. He wondered if he should categorize them according to subject matter, rather than by years. He found himself digressing constantly, so wrapped up in a vivid memory he lost his train of thought. Playing back the tapes simply triggered more memories he’d forgotten to mention. And he wanted them as sharply etched as he could get them, filled with smells and sounds and tastes. The words began to remind him of a Bosch or Bruegel panorama, so intricate and crowded with happenings he felt he was drowning in verbal chaos.

  Tapes covered his desk. Tapes were stacked on book shelves, in boxes, all over the floor along the walls. He gave up trying to mark them. There were times he worried that he was repeating himself, but decided twice was better than not at all. After much debate he decided he needed to put down the accident, too, so he would remember the why of things when it was all over.

  It was during one such recording that he broke down in tears. There were no words, he realized, that could convey the anguish over what he had lost. No one could ever possibly know unless they had lived it. He remembered what Sharkey had said—that it was like reading a book. Cody looked at the roomful of memories. Would that be all they were, once it was over? A lot of words? Vicarious experiences belonging to someone else? Would the words be enough to hold the memory of Jenny’s body next to him—the heat of her, the way her hair spilled over his face…the scent of her…. He closed his eyes. The tape ran, recording his silence.

  “I need more time,” he said when two weeks were up.

  “We need your decision now.” Meyers looked apologetic.

  “I’ll need more than three weeks to finish my life story. It’s not enough time.”

  “It’s all we can give you.”

  “It’s not enough. I don’t plan to off myself for lack of a past. I want as much as I can collect. I want my art, all the books I’ve read—I’m on the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization. That’s eleven volumes when I’m done, each book numbering God knows how many thousands of pages. You have any idea what that means? Can you put that back? I want nursery rhymes, I want…” He stopped. “I can’t do it. I can’t get it all down.”

  Meyers straightened the ink blotter on his desk. “Does this mean you chose to bow out of Project R.A.B.B.?”

  “No.”

  “Once you’ve made the commitment—once you’ve begun the Sleep, there will be no turning back. You understand that?”

  “Yes. I just…there’s not enough time.”

  “It’s all we can offer.” He laid the papers out in front of Cody.

  Slowly Cody maneuvered the pen in the brace and signed his name.

  Three weeks later, as they began to prep him for the Sleep, he was still capturing his past. In the last week he had begun to sketch memories, hoping pictures truly would be more than thousands of words.

  He closed his eyes as they wheeled him into the room with the tank, praying he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  Suddenly a whole flood of memories tumbled across his mind—the summer of the worst dust storm he could remember, when the sky turned solid black in the middle of the day. They’d held wet washcloths over their faces and stuffed towels around windows and doors and still the dust blew in rivulets across the floor…going pecan thrashing with his dad, whacking the tree branches with long cane poles until the nuts fell like green-brown hail all around him…the blood brother ceremony at scout camp with Robbie Turner—he still had the scar…watching the tornado that sucked up half the town when he was nine…the drag race out by the lake when Tony Dawson almost flipped his dad’s car into the spillway…too much…too many things…. Everything was important. Absolutely all of it. Cody felt his tears trickle back along his scalp and grinned.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, opening his eyes. Meyers and the others were like a green cloth wall closing in on him, needles primed.

  “What?” Meyers did not sound happy. “You can’t stop now. We—”

  “Yeah, I can stop. I read the fine print.”

  There was, he thought, too much to say goodbye to. And yet—and yet there was something tantalizing about a blinding white, blank canvas. Tabula Rasa. Cody took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “I’m ready.” He hoped he had enough colors…it was going to be some kinda masterpiece.

  Introduction to “The Pure Product”

  by John Kessel

  When Bruce Sterling fired the first salvoes of the movement that eventually was branded as cyberpunk, he included in his gun-sights the “boring old farts” of “humanist” science fiction. It was John Kessel who adopted both names, the first with humor and the second with earnestness, issuing a “humanist manifesto” and becoming the spokesman of a movement that didn’t know it existed until it was attacked.

  Time has its own irony in the unfolding of events. Though Sterling’s ideology was one of invention and reinvention, of scientific rigor and resistance to mindless consensus futures, “cyberpunk” has become a name for one of the least rigorous and most mindlessly consensual groups in science fiction. The “cyberpunks” write their imitation William Gibson stories with exactly the level of originality that one finds in Star Trek novels. But Sterling’s admonitions did not fall entirely on deaf ears. Oddly enough, the writers who show the most evidence of having listened to Sterling are, yes, the boring old farts of “humanist” science fiction. In the wilderness between Moby-Dick and Neuromancer, they began to blaze new trails. And now there is more in common between John Kessel and Bruce Sterling than between either of them and the “cyberpunks.”

  Which does not mean that you will recognize anything in “The Pure Product” as particularly cyberpunkish. (Actually, it can be read as, among other things, a satire on the amorality of elites.) Nor do I think Kessel necessarily reflects at all times the values he proclaimed in his humanist manifesto. It is not humanism that makes this story go so much as humanity: Kessel’s own, and the trust he has in ours.

  Kessel and I have, from time to time, disagreed about what makes good fiction good; he tends to reject as worthless whole swaths of fiction that I admire, and I get impatient with the excesses of some that he admires most. It may even be that he and I would disagree about why “The Pure Product” is a good story; but such a disagreement would be about what we meant by good, not about what “The Pure Product” is or means or does to its community of believing readers.

  Nor did I include “The Pure Product” simply because I had to have something by one of the most influential short-story writers of the 1980s (though that would have been reason enough). Even if “The Pure Product” had been the only published story by a writer who sent it off to Asimov’s and promptly died, I would have been proud to include it here for its own sake. Happily, the writer is still alive and continuing to do important work—and continuing to grow and change.

  THE PURE PRODUCT

  John Kessel

  I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose god tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.

  I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air conditioning, and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Road. August.

  The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of paintbrushes—the kind of semifriendly, publicly optimistic man who would tell you about his crazy wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a gallon of kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation, then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the Calvinist god and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting a business checking account. She gave me a form to fill out, then sent me to the office of Mr. Graves.

  Mr. Graves wielded a formidable handshake. “What can I do for you, Mr….?”

  “Tillotsen, Gerald Tillotsen,” I said. Gerald Tillotsen, of Tacoma, Washington, died of diphtheria at the age of four weeks—on September 24, 1938. I have a copy of his birth certificate.

  “I’m new to Kansas City. I’d like to open a business account here, and perhaps take out a loan. I trust this is a reputable bank? What’s your exposure in Brazil?” I looked around the office as if Graves were hiding a woman behind the hatstand, then flashed him my most ingratiating smile.

  Mr. Graves did his best. He tried smiling back, then looked as if he had decided to ignore my little joke. “We’re very sound, Mr. Tillotsen.”

  I continued smiling.

  “What kind of business do you own?”

  “I’m in insurance. Mutual Assurance of Hartford. Our regional office is in Oklahoma City, and I’m setting up an agency here, at 103rd and State Line.” Just off the interstate.

  He examined the form. His absorption was too tempting.

  “Maybe I can fix you up with a policy? You look like dead meat.”

  Graves’s head snapped up, his mouth half-open. He closed it and watched me guardedly. The dullness of it all! How I tire. He was like some cow, like most of the rest of you in this silly age, unwilling to break the rules in order to take offense. “Did he really say that?” he was thinking. “Was that his idea of a joke? He looks normal enough.” I did look normal, exactly like an insurance agent. I was the right kind of person, and I could do anything. If at times I grate, if at times I fall a little short of or go a little beyond convention, there is not one of you who can call me to account.

  Graves was coming around. All business.

  “Ah—yes, Mr. Tillotsen. If you’ll wait a moment, I’m sure we can take care of this checking account. As for the loan—”