The River of Forgetfulness

The movie was over and the screen credits were rolling when I noticed that the seat next to me was empty – the seat that should have contained Alan. I was annoyed. Alan was my date, after all, such as he was. At least he was human.

In the interval he had gone to get soda and popcorn while I checked out the crowd and applied fresh lipstick – crimson, to discourage intimacy, although I doubted that he would make any physical overtures. The dating program in the computer, while assuring me that Alan was one of the rare hundred percent original humans remaining in the solar system, had cast the holo of a middle-aged, bespectacled man with a timid smile. Looking at him, I was reminded of why people started messing about with their genes in the first place.

The crowd wasn’t much to speak of. A few humans, accompanied by their clones. A few mutants from the Vegan system, drawn no doubt by the movie’s gory 4D effects.

I don’t like mutants. I particularly didn’t like the one that was eyeing me from across the aisle, tapping a clawed hand on the armrest of its seat and smirking at me.

I tried not to let my anxiety show. Mutants with enhanced neurologies can pick up negative emotions and target solitary women. I strolled toward the exit, taking care not to touch anyone or think anything, although now that my initial surprise at Alan’s disappearance had subsided, I was beginning to feel angry. Who did he think he was, leaving me alone in the theatre! He might be human, he might draw a fat salary from Genset, the biggest bioengineering company this side of the galaxy, but he was still a weedy nothing to look at. Did he think I wasn’t worth spending the entire evening with? And here I had gone to such pains to look nice, in my best green gauze dress and glass slippers.

I was almost at the exit when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swung around, my heart beating fast. No one touches you on Luna, except a lover or the Pols. It’s simply not done. I hadn’t been touched in a long time.

It was a Pol, of course. Though the first thing I felt when I saw him standing there, with his calm face and deep brown eyes, was not fear or horror, but regret. Regret that he was a Pol, that he was not completely human (Pols never are.)

People can make themselves as tall or handsome or colourful as they wish, but there is a certain indefinable something that cannot be engineered. Call me old-fashioned, but I find the armies of tall, slim, clean-cut Lunarians gliding down the underground walkways as repulsive as their more extreme clawed and winged counterparts from the other systems. Whether they have fur, or shells, or just enhanced bipedal bodies, they’re all the same. They’re all fake. And I can smell them a mile away, worse luck for me.

The Pol flashed a silver badge and said, “Pol, Special Investigations. Step aside, please.”

I stepped aside. This was a nightmare. I had never been stopped by a Pol before. At any rate, this explained the intrusive tap on the shoulder.

The Pol looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Just routine questioning, nothing personal. So why such hostility?”

An empath! I blanked my mind and gave him a neutral-no-problem smile. I am good at this kind of thing. Some people go in for expensive neuro-technologies to enhance their mind-management skills. Some – like me – have a natural gift.

The Pol flicked out his digi-pad and said, looking straight at me out of soft brown eyes that I knew were not enhanced: “When is the last time you saw the being calling himself Alan Shearer?”

I was taken aback. “Wasn’t that Alan Shearer then? I can’t believe the computer in the Phebe social club would make an error, not when I had set such stringent requirements.”

 “The computer didn’t make a mistake,” the Pol said. “Computers never do, you know.”

I hid my irritation. “The last time I saw Alan, or whatever, was during the movie interval. I don’t know exactly when he disappeared, but when the movie was over and the lights came on, the seat next to me was empty. What’s the matter, has he done something wrong?”