Free Strongest Conjuration by Skyler White Page B

would function as well in her brain.”
    â€œAnd whether you’d hate it,” I added.
    â€œNo.” Ramon cupped Sarah’s breast, evaluating and abstracted. “I may prefer it. A body has never been what defines an Incrementalist.”
    â€œTo Ray.” Phil raised his wine glass. “Every bit as rational, now twice as pretty.”
    Ramon lifted his glass in manicured fingers. “It’s Ramon,” he corrected, and the worry pinching Phil’s eyebrows finally let go, if only incrementally. It really was Ramon. The trust between them went hundreds of years back, and Phil needed him there.
    3. His Castle
    In the glow of Ramon’s wine and Phil’s rustic pasta, our new house felt more ours for having shared it. I emptied Ramon’s bottle topping up his glass, and Phil went down the hall for a new one.
    â€œSo, Ren,” Ramon said, spooning himself seconds from the ancient earthenware dish, “what have you been working on?”
    It’s a question every Incrementalist has an answer for, and I did, my work just wasn’t meddlework. Ramon inclined his unfamiliar head in his familiar way, and my curiosity spilled over into the silence he held open. “I’d actually really like your insight,” I confessed. “I’ve been trying to figure out how the Garden actually works—the mechanisms of how it stores and shares memories—and you’re the first Incrementalist since Celeste to get a new Second without shading.”
    â€œIs this professional interest?”
    â€œNot really. Sort of.” I held Ramon’s eyes, and felt Phil’s as he came back in with the wine. “Yes, my agency has a client who’s working on an electronic model of human memory, but it’s primitive. They’re trying to remediate pathology, not enhance capacity. Honestly, if the Garden is to memory what the microprocessor is to computation, the rest of the world is still doing math on its fingers relative to us. Nobody’s even dreamed of building something with the kind of scope the Garden has.”
    â€œSomebody has.” Ramon put a neatly coiled forkful of pasta between his studiously lipsticked lips.
    I shrugged. “I’m not really, here or at work. An electronic version of the Garden would be years away, even if it’s possible, and it probably isn’t. I just want to know how, when one Incrementalist seeds a memory, the rest of us can graze it and remember too. Is there some actual, external
thing
we all share—some resource only Incrementalists can access? If there is, what is it, and how do we interface with it?”
    â€œYou’re not looking for a physical object or location?”
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œAnd why is my recent stub and Second relevant?”
    â€œI’ve been concentrating on the spiking ritual.”
    Ramon just waited.
    â€œDesigners study edge cases,” I explained. “Extreme users, handicapped users. Sometimes you can learn more about typical-use scenarios that way than you can from focusing just on the meaty part of the bell curve. I was hoping to find out something about our memory from the one thing that We Who Remember forget.”
    â€œWe don’t forget anything.” Ramon wiped crumbless fingers on his napkin.
    â€œSo you remember what turned Sarah Waverly into Ramon Llull two weeks ago?”
    â€œOf course not.” Ramon refilled my glass from Phil’s new bottle. “But I didn’t forget. One can’t lose what hasn’t been made.”
    I took a long, red swallow of wine, Ramon’s precision irritating me precisely. I started to brush off the quibble, but quibbles can be clues. He was right. I put my wine back down. “Okay,” I said, thinking it through. “You’re saying you have no memory of your stub getting spiked into Sarah because you didn’t make a memory of it. But why wouldn’t you? Maybe it’s