Some Of These Stars Might Already Be Gone
by Rich Larson
"Come on, Bea. I said I was sorry. Can't we just roll back?"
Bea is sitting on the couch with one hand clenched between her knees, the other propping up her head. She is staring straight ahead, but her Stream is shielded so Tyus can't tell if she's watching a show or messaging her sister or just staring straight ahead.
"We rolled back last week," she says, looking up at him at last. Her eyes are dry but still shot through with pink.
Tyus sinks carefully onto the cushion beside her and accesses his FreezeFeel data. "Ten days."
"What?"
"Ten days ago," Tyus says. "That's not bad. Some people are rolling back every other day, you know?" He worms her hand out from between her knees and holds it in his, rubbing small circles with his thumb. Her skin is cold. "Come on. You can pick the memory."
She takes the shield off her Stream and Tyus sees her pulling up their shared FreezeFeel stack. The luminous column of memories extends back to even before they were dating: a 2010s retroparty where everyone brought black plastic slabs and pretended they were phones, an afternoon of bouldering with mutual friends. Then the memories come thick and fast: a rush of electric evenings, sex and dancing and midnight conversations. Lazy morning-afters, watching procedurally generated cartoons stoned in bed, making pancakes with peanut butter and jelly.
Tyus tries not to notice how few new ones have appeared in the past three months. The important thing is that the best and brightest FreezeFeel entries are still there, still pristine, and that they are more than archaic audiovisual data. Each one is accompanied by a neural map that will send sparks through the same synapses, trigger the same hormone loops, the same dopamine release. Each one can roll them back to the way they felt right then.
For those perfect things that never last long enough: FreezeFeel.
Bea takes her time selecting the memory, scrolling up and down the stack, and for the first time Tyus feels the bite of paranoia: maybe she is scrolling slowly to show him that there are more entries on his side than on hers. He knows that, even if he's resisted the urge to count.
Then she picks stargazing, from last November, and Tyus can breathe easy. They've used it before. It's one of his personal favorites and lately one of hers, too.
"Do it in sync?" Tyus asks.
