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Ewing taught her how to do it safely, with a red foil wrapper from one of those strawberry candies they gave out with your bill at every Chinese restaurant. "They're for good luck," he'd said, the first time they tried it. That, and something to do with electrical conductivity. That way you got unlimited minutes and the full spectrum of sensation, undiluted by the cranial filters they put in to stop people from spiraling out. Or, as Ewing put it, to stop people like them from having fun.

They'd been having a lot of fun, lately.

Kath lay on the dusty couch cushions they'd arranged on the floor, waiting for Ewing's cue. They'd been squatting in the abandoned house for the last week, having broken in after confirming there was nobody on the premises. Ewing was fiddling with the memory tripper that lay in a nest of cables near her elbow. The device sounded stressed, it was whirring so loudly. He glanced down at the file queue, and Kath sensed rather than saw his frown.

"This playlist again?" he said, tapping the plastic casing with a chewed-up finger. "Like you actually miss that place or something."

Kath swallowed and felt the remains of the candy stick in her throat. "I wouldn't go back if it was a smoking crater in the ground."

"That's not what you said yesterday."

"I was in argument mode, dummy." She put a hand on her boyfriend's knee and squeezed. "Look, most of my memories are from living with her, the good and the bad. Even if it was mostly bad. So there's more content to draw from, that's all."

Ewing wouldn't meet her eyes. "It's just, I know things haven't been working out for us the way you maybe thought they would. Thought maybe you'd started having regrets."

"Wait another fifteen years," she said. "Then we'll have plenty of memories of each other to trip when we're older."

"You think it'll take us that long to make it?"

Make it. As in, make it work, make it big, make it out. After months of sleeping in Ewing's car, waiting for the adventure to finally start, the phrase had started to lose all meaning. Ewing had five years over Kath's sixteen, but constantly having to comfort him made her feel so much older.

Instead of answering Ewing's question, Kath got up on her elbows and plastered a sticky kiss on his stubbly cheek. "I'm ready," was all she said.

She watched as Ewing folded up the crinkly bit of foil, pushed it onto the cable connector, and tucked the ends into the seal. When he was done, he lifted it before her eyes and gave it an anticipatory wiggle. "All aboard, oh captain?"

Kath lay back down and folded her hands over her empty stomach. Not for the first time, she noticed that the water damage in the ceiling looked like a map outline of the West Coast before the big one hit. A similar map had been projected on the wall of her high school geo-history class. It hadn't been that long since she'd dropped out, a couple months tops, but it felt like eons ago.

The tripper clicked as it shifted into high gear, bringing her back to the present moment. Then the wrapper-coated tip of the connector was at her lips, and she parted them to let the waters rush in.

#

Lucid-tripping, they call it. Colours intensify, senses heighten. Familiar images become strange and new, sharper in some places and blurrier in others. The right hack can make sunlight brighter, smiles wider. People laugh louder at your jokes. The simplest birdsong sounds like a symphony. You cry so hard at your sister's wedding from five years ago, you think your heart's about to burst.

Originally, the tripper was invented strictly for the courtrooms: a device that lets you revisit your own memories in five-minute chunks, for the purpose of verifying eyewitness testimony in criminal trials. Then the tech got leaked, and copies injected with some thrill-seeker's amateur crack code hit the streets. They say a hacked tripper is better than drugs, better than virtual reality. It's the ultimate enhanced nostalgia.

But whatever control the user thinks they have is an illusion. There are hidden dangers that might run you aground if you're lucky, or grab you and drag you down if you're not. Whirlpools. Invisible currents.

Shadows in the deep.

#

Kath feels the hot water cascade down her bare flesh and doesn't even open her eyes. She knows she's back in that ugly stucco prison, to which she'd sworn never to return. At least, not in the flesh. But the water heater is busted in the place where she and Ewing are squatting, so she's made a whole memory playlist drawn from over a decade's worth of hot showers. Being able to just stand here in the warmth and the steam, in total privacy, makes it easy to forget whose house this is.

Maybe it's a waste of a lucid trip, but those showers were the best part of her days growing up. She'd spend whole hours in the bathroom if she could help it, the heat cranked up high enough that she could feel the sting on her reddening flesh. Just painful enough to make her forget her troubles at school, Ewing's probation, the constant nagging at home. The look Dad gave her just before he walked out. The fact that he escaped first and didn't take Kath with him. She tilts her head back and lets all of it swirl down, down the drain...

"Kathryn!" A sharp knocking on the bathroom door. "How long have you been in there?"

Kath draws breath to yell back, then catches herself. The tripper is supposed to edit out these unpleasant moments. Sometimes it snags, and a snag can lead to spiraling out. But Ewing taught her well. Kath concentrates, trying to lose herself once more in the rush of water.

The knocking increases in volume. "You know other people besides you live in this house, right? Kathryn? I know you can hear me!"

And then something funny happens. The echoey sounds of the bathroom, and her mother's voice, disappear. Instead she hears splashing, laughter. Kath opens her eyes and looks down, noticing a ripple of light dance across the palm of her hand. Beyond her puckered fingers, she sees her bare feet wavering spectrally above bright aquamarine tiles. A mild breeze raises goosebumps on her exposed upper arms. She's not in the shower any more. She's not even in the house.

Memory jump, Kath thinks. Rare, but not uncommon. Sometimes the user's brain associates the current memory with another and switches over to it without warning, like a skipping record. It's best not to overthink it. The tripper works best with a light touch.

So Kath relaxes and takes stock. She's sitting on the side of the swimming pool with her legs in the water, watching her toes ripple under the surface. It's a hot day in July, and this is her childhood friend Luci's eleventh birthday party. The pool is filled with graceless pre-adolescent bodies, mostly hanging off the sides or paddling around on foam noodles. The tripper intensifies the sunlight sparkling off the water so that it's almost blinding.

If the pool wasn't so full, Kath would be doing laps right now. Whenever she's submerged, her body gets restless, like she needs to kick out and keep kicking until she hits the other side. Unlike her usual slouching gait on land, her swim strokes are calm and powerful, and she can hold her breath for ages. Like she was born in the water, her high school coach used to say.

I don't understand why you quit the swim team. Kath hears her mother's voice echo in her head, a memory within a memory. Why give up the only thing you're good at?

The water in the pool grows a little colder. The sounds of laughter dim, along with the sunlight. Kath feels herself destabilizing again, knows she has to anchor herself. There isn't even time to wonder why her mother seems to be following her around like a ghost, even into memories that have nothing to do with her. It's the same old dynamic. Kath's only instinct is to get away, by any means necessary.

Slowly, carefully, Kath slips off the edge of the pool and lets herself sink to the bottom of the deep end. She holds her breath and looks up at the forest of skinny legs flapping awkwardly above her, the sunlight flickering between them in fierce white patches. Unbidden, the Jaws theme starts playing in her head. She imagines razored teeth tearing into flesh, a crimson plume billowing into the chlorinated water. She can almost taste the iron sliding down her throat, hot and slick, the sudden violence a different kind of escape.

Kath giggles. A red cloud of bubbles rises and obscures her vision.

When the blood clears, she's somewhere else.

#

When a user starts spiraling, you can't just yank out the cable. You're more likely to accidentally wipe their memories than if you just wait it out and hope they recover on their own, but sometimes it's too late. Sometimes they get stuck in a feedback loop, re-living the same moment over and over, unable to resurface. Or their adult memories get overwritten by those of their infant self. The number of tripper-related tragedies grows longer and more varied by the year.

And then there are the strange cases. The user drowns, leaving no trace of their original identity behind. But something in them is still alive, gliding through the shadowy recesses of what was once a human mind. Awakened from its deep slumber in some forgotten crevasse of their psyche.

Here be dragons.

#

Another jump. The tripper doesn't usually skip around this much. The memories haven't turned into nightmares, so she's not spiraling, not yet. But the fear is starting to bubble up inside her, and sometimes just the thought of capsizing is enough to tip your mind into doing it. Don't panic, Kath, she repeats to herself. Go with the flow.

She looks around to try and orient herself and recognizes the virtual aquarium in the Museum of Natural History where she and Ewing liked to get high. In fact, that's what they're doing right now. The two of them stand side by side in front of the immense holo-tank, staring up at the gracefully bizarre shapes of the computer-generated marine creatures gliding past. The hacked tripper amps up her buzz, so that she can feel Ewing's life force pulsing through their intertwined hands like a glowing pink light. The oceanic display before them looks bigger than the entire universe.

There's a school group milling about nearby. Most of the students are on their phones or chattering away, ignoring their automated guide, who looks like a shinier version of Wall-E from the old animated flattie. Seeing the robot helps Kath identify the memory's timestamp: one perfect Friday afternoon, bombing around town with Ewing after ditching class for the last time. They visit all their favourite places, talking endlessly about the amazing things they'll do once they're finally free of their bio families. The aquarium is their last stop.

Kath grips Ewing's hand as a huge, looming blimp with fins swings slowly into view, dwarfing the display tag along its side that reads: "Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus. Conservation status: Extinct." The tiny text accompanies the majestic creature as it follows a procedurally generated route through the shimmering depths, the likes of which Earth will never see again.

The effect impresses even Ewing. "I fucking love fish," he whispers reverently. "Especially that big guy."

"Whales aren't fish," Kath says, letting the memory's original script play out. "They're mammals. Like us."

"No way. Hey, does that mean we evolved from whales?"

"I thought we evolved from monkeys."

Something behind them beeps, and they both jump. The guide bot seems to have given up on the school group, latching onto Ewing and Kath instead. In a polite electronic voice, it recites: "The common ancestor of humans, monkeys, and whales was likely a small, furry mammal who lived in trees and ate insects. Thanks to extensive DNA sequencing, scientists know that this hypothetical creature is the earliest ancestor of all living placentals today, including humans, apes, whales, bats, cats, and mice."

"Fascinating," Ewing says sarcastically. Kath lets go of his hand.

"What about further back?" she asks the guide bot. "I mean, they say all life crawled out of the ocean, so that means our oldest ancestor must have been some kind of fish, right?"

The bot turns towards the holo-tank and beeps again. The eighteen foot tall screen shimmers, momentarily breaking the three-dimensional illusion, and the Blue Whale fades from view. The clear azure waters darken to a cloudy greyish-green. The flora takes on unfamiliar shapes: elongated cones tipped with long, red tendrils, colourful mushroom-like polyps, tufted fronds waving atop slender stalks. One by one, the tank starts generating black dots off in the distance, strange helmeted things with too many legs that scuttle along the seabed. The date counter in the lower right of the screen whirls from 1 MILLION YEARS AGO to 370 MILLION YEARS AGO, the numbers spinning too fast to track.

And then, from out of the murky depths, an immense form drifts leisurely into view. Some kind of monstrous fish, nearly ten metres in length and the colour of rusted iron. The tail and fins have the sleek tapered lines of a shark, but its face is a nightmare skull of smooth armoured plates. Instead of teeth, the plates simply protrude from the upper and lower halves of its mouth in jagged rows. Its gaping jaws are big enough to swallow Ewing whole.

"Dunkleosteus terrelli," Kath reads the tag out loud. "Conservation status: Extinct."

She watches a school of trilobites part before the slow, menacing glide of the armoured fish's shadow, like sparrows taking flight before the crushing treads of a tank. D. terrelli does a pass before its tiny human audience, then circles back, this time pinning Kath with a single baleful eye. Like it's trying to communicate something, a line from an equally ancient movie her father once made her watch before he left: I could've grown legs. I could've been a contender.

Further into the depths, hundreds of torpedo shapes pierce the gloom. Kath watches them with a longing so powerful it feels like nausea. "Maybe it's not too late to go back," she whispers, off-script.

"What?" Ewing says, then glances down. "Oh, shit."

Kath feels something cool running under the thin soles of her sneakers. She steps back with a splash. The students, finally paying attention to something other than their phones, make vague noises of alarm. The virtual fish swim on, undisturbed.

"C'mon, we better get out of here." Ewing takes her arm, but she pulls away. The water is creeping up her ankles. She turns back to the holo-tank and sees a tiny crack in the virtual glass separating the audience from the projection stage. As she watches, the crack grows bigger, inch by inch. A voice over the intercom calmly instructs everyone to evacuate the aquarium.

"Kath, are you nuts?" Ewing screams. "Let's go!"

But that's impossible. The tank is a holographic simulator. There's no way it could spring a leak, unless...

"You're spiraling, Kath. Focus on my voice. You've got to pull yourself out—"

She senses Ewing, or the memory of him, tug harder on her arm. For an instant, the noise and panic around her recedes. She can hear the whirr of the tripper and Ewing shouting in her ear, can feel her weight sinking into the couch cushions. The taste of strawberry candy is sickly-sweet on her tongue. But she stands her ground, and the aquarium snaps back into sharp relief around her.

"—could open their jaws in 20 milliseconds and chomp down almost as fast," the guide bot is saying cheerfully. "This fearsome fish was estimated to have a maximum bite force of over 1600 pounds."

The crack reaches the top of the tank. It splinters. The gray-green water explodes outwards, taking all the strange plants and the trilobites and the bladed fish with it. They hurtle towards her in a slow-motion wave, Dunkleosteus terrelli at the forefront. Kath flings open her arms and lets the flood smash into her head-on. The last thing she sees is the sight of those jagged plates bearing down on her, opened wide enough to devour the world, before they slam shut and send her into darkness.

#

There's a rumour that a hacked tripper can allow users access to ancestral memories. Not in immersive high definition, like with neurological memory, but from dim impressions etched indelibly into the chromatin network. There's more than one kind of memory, after all. We pass on what our bodies do not allow us to forget.

But if any of this is remotely true, why stop at human genetics? Recall our recent ancestors, the great apes, with whom we still share 98.8% of our DNA. Go back even further, before we went into the trees, to when we walked on four legs instead of two. Back further still, legs melting to fins, fur to scales. Follow, if mind and machine can bear it, the scar of separation anxiety that runs through all our land-bound kind. And when you retrace the countless staggering footprints in the sand back to its source, you will find yourself here once more: the heaving shores of our first and greatest mistake.

#

Kath stands barefoot in the surf, staring out over a calmly rolling sea. The sun blazes over the long stretch of beach, with its half-naked tourists lounging about on rainbow bath towels and collapsible loungers. She's wearing a skimpy bikini because she knows it will piss off the woman behind her. Everything is just as she remembers it, and more.

It's amazing how much detail the tripper can pull out of a hacked memory. There's a group of young, bronzed model types playing volleyball nearby. A couple of boys run past, shouting. One of them is wearing Spongebob Squarepants swim trunks. Kath turns her head slightly and sees her mother out of the corner of her eye, hidden under at least three different types of shade and pretending to read a romance paperback. Kath doesn't need the tripper to remember what happens next.

"Hey, K-Pop," says Kath's mother from under her oversized sun hat. "Why don't you get in there and show me your front crawl? Teach these jerks who's the queen of the sea around here."

Kath doesn't respond. The voice behind her turns casually sour. "Scared of the water, all of a sudden? Or just trying to tart it up in front of the beach boys?"

Again, Kath stays quiet. She sees her mother's shadow on the white sand come up to her from behind and merge with her own.

"I brought you here to have a nice time. Can't you give me a little credit for trying?" There was a long pause. "You could at least turn around and look at me when I'm talking to you—"

Garish red-painted fingernails, clawing at her bare shoulder. Kath whirls, screaming, "Don't touch me!" People stare. A seagull cries. For a moment, Kath sees herself through her mother's eyes, can feel the strain of perpetual disappointment that is their shared bloodline. Generations of Kaths and Kaths' Mothers, genetically predisposed to poor life decisions. Pioneer Kath, Ancient Rome Kath, Cave Kath, Ape Kath. All dreaming of the day one of them manages to break the cycle.

The blue sky stutters. Glitches. A seagull jumps backward midflight. And Kath remembers that this is the day she decides to run away with Ewing. It isn't a momentous decision. Kath's mother is acting the way she normally does, and even though Kath knows things could be worse, she equally knows that her life will never be her own if she stays here. With the sun browning her bare shoulders, toes digging into the hot fine sand, Kath silently composes a list of the stuff she'll pack when Ewing finally comes to take her away for good.

That's how it went down in reality. Only, there's something different about the lucid trip version of the scene. Kath can't quite put her finger on it. Then she realizes: there's nobody in the water. The sandy beach is packed with people, but she's the only one even close to the shoreline. The ocean stretches before her, empty to the horizon. Waiting.

"Hey, K-Pop. Why don't you get in there and show me your front crawl? Teach these jerks who's the queen of the sea around here."

This time, Kath says, "Okay, mom. I will." She glances over her shoulder. The woman lying there on her faded beach towel looks sketched out, unfinished. Her face is hidden under the brim of her ridiculous hat. Whenever Kath and her mother go out in public together, people mistake them for sisters.

"Kath, for Christ's sake, wake up!"

She looks for the lifeguard on duty, sees them perched in their lookout chair even though there's nobody to look out for. She hears Ewing calling her again. But it's too late. She's already moving towards the water.

"Fuck it, I'm going to call the—"

Ewing's sobbing voice is lost as she plunges into the surf. She kicks out, arms arcing out of the waves, and with a few powerful strokes leaves the coastline behind. After a few moments, once she's certain nobody is following her, she dives. Waves crash noisily around her head, and then everything is blissfully silent. The water is warm as soup, the dim sunlight diffusing into a grey-green murk. Particulate matter streams by her face as she descends, the determined rhythms of her body rippling with a familiar strength. She'd forgotten how much easier it is to move through this world than the one above.

She reaches the bottom much sooner than expected. The seas are shallow here, and crowded. Living shadows move across her vision. Her neck is stiff, and she finds she needs to torque her entire upper body to look from side to side. It no longer feels like she's moving through water, more like the water is moving through her, until the distinction simply dissolves away.

The shadows darken and solidify as she moves towards them. The world is filled with purposeful missiles gliding over and under each other, each going about their unhurried business. Bladed fins jut from smooth torpedo bodies, split on one end by gaping mouths. Aquatic insectoids wander the seabed below, scurrying between fronded creatures that wave gently in the breeze-like current.

With the final vestiges of sapient thought, the nameless, supple thing that was Kath feels vaguely foolish. She never should have left, she sees that now. She had tried walking on her own two feet, tripped, and fell hard enough to bleed. But gravity holds no sway here. This planet is more water than land, and water washes away everything. Even regret.

At the end, just before the heavy plates close around Kath's mind and bear her down into the ancient depths forever, the lingering sweetness in her mouth turns suddenly to salt.

#

"Hey Dee. Got another drowner for you."

Dr. Nidhi turned around as the on-duty nurse caught up to her in the hallway. He handed her a clipboard and kept pace with her, resuming his summary.

"Kid let his girl spiral out on one of those memory rewinding things. Too scared to pull the plug, so he called 911. Came in with the ambulance, spent an hour or so bawling to the police in the waiting room before they took him to the station."

"Third one this year." Nidhi shook her head and flipped through vital stats. "How are those things still legal?"

"My cousin got called as a witness for some hit-and-run last fall," the nurse said. "They used one to get the license plate match out of his head. But the ones on the street, they're just kids messing with neurotech they don't understand. Like that haptics virus from a couple years back."

"Good move for the boyfriend to call in, though," Nidhi said absently. "Poor kid. Probably get off on a Good Samaritan." She stopped walking and the nurse almost bumped into her. "Er, what room?"

"137. Presentation's a little funny. I'm just going down to grab a vent tube, but I'll be right back."

"Thanks. Oh, Sam, did you sign Erika's birthday card yet?"

The nurse made an exaggerated wince and jogged off. Nidhi made her way to 137 and peeled back the curtain surrounding the bed. The girl lying there couldn't be much older than seventeen. Tangled dirty-blonde hair. Strong, broad shoulders. That was maybe the worst part, how healthy she looked. Most drowners were still technically alive and well in the world of their memories, more so than typical coma patients. Their sensory cortexes still lit up at stimuli no one else could perceive: taste, pain, the smell of bonfires at dusk. If Nidhi didn't know better, she could almost believe they might wake up any second.

She checked the monitors at the side of the bed and frowned. Most drowners had a pretty regular EKG, but this one was monstrously slow, showing a heart rate just barely above 20 BPM. And when she looked into the girl's eyes to check her visual response, there wasn't the blank, empty stare that most drowners had when they spiraled out. Not an absence of memory, but an overabundance, if that made any sense. The girl glared back at Nidhi with gray-green eyes that seemed almost aware of the doctor's presence, tracking every movement like a predator watching its prey.

That gaze was old, impossibly old. And hungry. Nidhi took an involuntary step back.

"Dee? I've got the thing. And, uh, we have a visitor."

Nidhi turned to see Sam in the doorway, nervously clutching the vent tube. Behind him stood a disheveled woman with dirty-blonde hair straggling out from under a worn baseball cap. The garish red polish on her nails was chipped and fading. Her eyes focused on the still figure in the bed and fixed there, unblinking.

"Ms. Gorecki?" Nidhi tried to put on her best bedside manner. "My condolences. This must be very difficult for you, but I promise we'll do our best to make sure that Kathryn has the best recovery possible. She's stabilized now, and after we run some more tests—"

Ms. Gorecki walked past the doctor and into the room with slow, deliberate steps, as if she too were lost in a dream from which she could not escape. She stopped next to the bed and leaned over to look at her daughter's pale face, in which floated those wide, staring, somehow ancient eyes. If Kathryn Gorecki recognized her mother, she gave no indication.

Ms. Gorecki did not reach out to touch the girl, nor did she start crying. Nidhi and Sam kept still, as if bearing witness. Minutes passed. Finally, the woman turned to them and gave a small, sad smile.

"It's okay," Ms. Gorecki whispered. Her hands were clenched tight on the bed's railing. "She'll be okay. She always was a good swimmer."

© 2025 Sagan Yee