Free The Embers Of My Heart by Christopher Nelson Page B

exactly," she said. "There is a limit to what biokinesis can do. We can regenerate fingers and hands, we can dismantle a cancer from within, but we cannot bring dead brain cells back to life. We caught the bleed before there was severe trauma, but between that and the original injuries, she...changed."
    "Changed." I turned that word over in my mind. It made sense. When I first met her, she was much more cheerful and outgoing. On Valentine's Day last year, she had been friendly toward everyone. It was only afterwards that she had turned colder toward other people. The real changes had started after the trip to Washington. It explained a great many things. "Is that why she broke up with her boyfriend?"
    Absynthe's eyes had been full of sadness, but at that question, she blinked. "Boyfriend?"
    "You know, the boyfriend she had when she started here."
    "What boyfriend?"
    I felt my eyes go wide and my heart started pounding. "She told me. I told her I wanted to be more than friends. She told me she had a boyfriend. What the fuck?"
    Absynthe immediately recoiled and her eyes glowed green. "I didn't-"
    "No!" Psionic energy flooded my mind, forcing a gasp of pain from my lungs, and she held her hands up. "No. Don't make me forget that."
    "I wasn't going to." Absynthe reached her hands out to me again. "Trust me?"
    I looked at her. Her expression was full of sympathy. I let go of my power and she simply put her hands on my head, then pulled me closer into a gentle embrace. "Is it all a lie?" I whispered against her.
    "It's not a lie," she whispered back.
    "But it wasn't what she wanted before."
    "But it is what she wants now."
    "I took that decision away from her."
    "Don't say that." Absynthe's arms tightened around me. "Yes, she changed. But, you don't know what she wanted before, and you don't know if things would have turned out differently. Don't assume it wasn't meant to be."
    I shivered in her arms. "I wish I could apologize to her."
    "It was an accident," she said. "Kevin, she'd forgive you, because she's happy now. You need to forgive yourself too."
    I didn't want to forgive myself. I had changed her entire reality. "I know it was an accident, but this is something that's going to affect her for the rest of her life."
    "As far as she's concerned, nothing has changed," Absynthe said. "We made sure to smooth things over for her."
    I slowly sat up, breaking the embrace. Absynthe slid her hands down to hold mine. "You modified her memories?"
    "Of course," Absynthe said. "We removed both traumas and inserted bridge memories to explain the gaps. Nothing outlandish, just enough to not be confusing. It's standard operating procedure for accidents of that nature. Trust me, we've dealt with worse. Try explaining the loss of a hand to someone, for example. We were lucky the regeneration was successful."
    "Can a memory change be undone?" I asked.
    Absynthe squeezed my hands. "Don't think about it."
    "I wasn't, but in general."
    "Yes and no. It gets complex. If it's a memory that they don't bring up much, sure, easy enough. If it's something they think about on and off, you can restore the original memory, but then they'll have two different memories of the same event. In many cases, they'll pick the memory they want to be the 'real' one. Sometimes you have to erase the false memory, in which case you leave them with what they might think is a false memory even though it's real. Which means you may have to insert additional memories to reinforce the truth."
    I took that all in as she explained it. The moral of the story as I took it was not to fuck around with false memories unless you really needed to. Still, it gave me some hints as to how to tell if someone tweaked my memories. So far, I didn't think so, but there was a non-trivial chance that the Establishment was pushing people around by tweaking a memory here, a thought there.
    "You should go back now," Absynthe said. She abruptly let go of my hands. "I believe you're about to have a