KURSE

I needed to know when the dreaded corporate meeting would start. You know the kind. A bunch of self-important muckety-mucks gathering around a table to discuss the company's latest catastrophe, a ritual that always devolves into "blame-storming" until some poor sap with the least influence and the least connection to the actual problem gets buried under it. The satisfied attendees then adjourn, and the problem stays right there on the table, festering like a glop of cancerous pus nobody has the stomach to touch. Uncleaned. Unresolved. Still there. Possibly filing its own expense report by now.

Dreading the farce to come, I stuck my finger in my ear, pulled on my lower lip, and balanced on my right leg like a caffeinated flamingo. This was not self-abuse to distract me from the coming pain of the meeting, though I'll admit it would've worked for that too. I was rebooting my memory chip. It wasn't taking. I prodded around behind my ear, and that's when the horror set in.

The chip wasn't in.

It wasn't on the little table by the door. Not on the dresser. Not, curiously, balanced on the microwave, where it had no business being in the first place. If I'd only had my memory chip handy, I would've known exactly where it was. That's the cruelty of it, I needed the very thing I'd lost in order to find the thing I'd lost. It was a philosophical trap wearing the shape of a Tuesday morning. Whatever happened to clappers? A simple two-clap system never once needed a firmware update. I felt again at the little slots at the base of my skull. Still forlornly, mockingly empty. I kept hunting.

Socks, underwear, old restaurant receipts, and tattered coupons for free travel that I would never redeem flew about the room as I whirled through my cushy, upscale apartment like a tornado with a LinkedIn profile. Every drawer hung open in a kind of silent scream. Shirts and shredded paperwork drooped off the edges of overturned furniture. It had to be somewhere. I mean, I definitely had it last... somewhere. Doing something. That information, annoyingly, was also on the chip. The chip had become both the crime scene and the only witness.

I checked my watch, which, being an actual watch and not a neural implant, told me only the time and not one useful thing about my future. The meeting was coming up soon. I still didn't know when "soon" actually meant. That got me thinking about my calendar, so I stuck my right thumb in my mouth and pulled at the skin of my right eye with my left pinkie finger, which is, I promise you, a completely normal way to check a schedule.

That's what it took to access the files on my memory chip. The gesture brought up a visual overlay directly on my retina—meaning I could see it, but no one else could, which made me extremely popular at parties in my early twenties and extremely alarming since. That overlay gave me a file listing I could browse by pointing and selecting with my left index finger, in the air, but only while simultaneously grabbing my left butt cheek with my right hand. It's a lot to ask of a Tuesday. Naturally, no visual came up, because, hang on, gimme a sec, it's right there... oh, right. Because the flipping memory chip was still missing. Groping my own backside had accomplished nothing except reminding me I skipped leg day.

Sounds stupid, I know. Let me assure you, it was completely typical at the time. This is how it went in the early days of implantable chips, back when the only command protocol that worked reliably was Kinesthetic-Usage for Retrievable Systems Erudition, or KURSE, a name some committee of engineers clearly workshopped for weeks and then decided was funny enough to ship. Back then nobody fully understood how people and machines were supposed to cooperate. But we did know that thinking a certain thought, or moving a certain way, reliably fired certain neurons, and the chips learned to listen for exactly that. The trick was making sure you didn't accidentally trigger a command sequence while just, say, sipping your Starbucks. So the gestures had to be strange. Deliberately, humiliatingly strange. Nobody would ever do these things by accident. That indignity was the whole security system. It worked great, right up until it didn't.

And right now, KURSE wasn't doing diddly for me. So I grabbed my coat and left the apartment. There was an outside chance I'd left the chip at the coffee shop. Why would anyone take their memory chip out at a coffee shop, you ask? Because that first jolt of caffeine sends a chaotic little firework display through your nervous system, and every so often those sparks land exactly on your chip's control sequence. You could wipe the whole thing accidentally, all because you liked your espresso a little too much. Every coffee shop had a laminated sign about it, right next to the one about mask etiquette from a decade nobody talks about anymore.

So I trudged down the sidewalk toward my favorite coffee shop, which was right over, no, hold on. It was down this block — no. It was... well, frack. The address was on the stupid memory chip too. I was going to be late for a meeting whose start time I didn't know, about a topic I also didn't know, and Iwould still be blamed by people who definitely knew both. So I did the only reasonable thing left. I just started walking, powered entirely by spite and the vague hope that my feet remembered more than my brain did.

I passed a young woman standing by a taxi. She had one pump heel off, held in her left hand, and was yanking her own hair so hard her head flopped backwards like a marionette with a grudge. A couple of older women walked by and audibly commented on how deranged she looked. Rubes, I thought, and actually snorted out loud. The young woman was obviously taking an international call on her implanted phone. Those old ladies had no idea how silly they sounded, judging a woman for doing complicated business over the Atlantic Ocean using nothing but her own skull.

I kept walking, with no plan whatsoever. Without my chip I had no structure, no scaffolding, nothing. No dings, no bells, no schedule reminders nagging me back onto the rails. No news alerts, no spam, no ads clawing for a sliver of my attention. I was well and truly, gloriously, terrifyingly lost. And then I smelled something. Reflexively, I went to stick my thumb in my mouth and yank at my eyelid again, then caught myself; that particular trick was not, in fact, going to identify a smell, no matter how badly muscle memory insisted otherwise.

Then it hit me properly. Freshly mown grass. God, I hadn't smelled that in years.

I'd wandered, without noticing, into the park I used to play in as a kid, long before anyone in my family could afford a chip of their own. About a hundred meters in, I spotted a tree I recognized immediately, and smiling like an idiot, I walked straight for it. That was the tree where I kissed Sarah Patterson on the mouth. At the time I'd been very proud of myself for being the aggressor. Then she grabbed my butt, a much more competent grab than the one I'd been giving myself all morning, and pulled me in for round two, and I realized with the sudden clarity only a nine-year-old can achieve that she had lured me there and was, in fact, entirely in charge. My nine-year-old brain short-circuited. I bolted like the building was on fire.

I smiled at the memory, which felt strange and warm coming from somewhere that wasn't a chip. Off to my right there used to be a little stand where, as a kid, I blew my whole lunch budget on ice cream and soda. I stopped and stared. The old stone facing was still there. Ivy still climbed the wooden wickerwork out front. The rusting old hand-pump still stood off to one side, its wet cement base pulling up a whole reel of hot summer days, dripping ice cream cones, and water-balloon ambushes.

My body wanted to go there before my brain had finished deciding to. My legs just turned and carried me closer, dreamlike, while the rest of me tried to catch up. The sign out front no longer read "Tad's Treats." Now it read something in Kanji, followed by "Bonny Bonsai." I walked up to the entrance just as someone inside shouted, with real feeling, "Farkin' shite!"

That is how I met Patrick Hiromatsu, a mixed Irish-Japanese man with a deep and abiding love of bonsai trees, which he claimed relaxed him. This claim was, in the moment, contradicted by every available piece of evidence. He was a committed southpaw who had recently slammed a car door on his own left hand, most of which was now in a cast, which made handling delicate tree-trimming shears roughly as easy as threading a needle wearing oven mitts.

I stood in the doorway with my mouth hanging open. Shelves of tiny, gorgeous bonsai lined every wall, a hundred small green sculptures that human patience had talked nature into. I'd never actually bothered to look closely at a bonsai tree before. Human ideals of beauty grafted onto the real, stubborn beauty of a living thing, and the result was something quietly, heart-stoppingly elegant. I breathed in the smell of wet earth and green growing things, and I forgot, entirely and for the first time all morning, that I had ever owned a memory chip at all. I let out the happy sigh of a man who has just stumbled, by complete accident, onto that ethereal, hard-to-name "it."

Patrick sighed too, though his came from a rather more earthbound place. He went to run his good hand through his hair, forgot about the cast, and rammed it directly into his own forehead. "Ow!" He reached up to rub the sore spot — with the cast, and clocked himself again. "Ai!" Turned out he was profoundly, catastrophically left-handed, in the way some people are profoundly bad at parallel parking. It was less a skill gap than a personality trait.

I shouldn't have said it, but I couldn't help myself. "Need a hand?"

"Haha. Real original," Patrick muttered, not looking up. "You here to buy a tree, or just here to yank my chain?"

I held up both hands, no harm intended. "No. Just stopped in to look at your place. This work is gorgeous."

"Yeah?" He gave a wan smile. "Thanks, man. Any chance you meant that offer?"

"Sure," I said, grinning like a kid who'd just been handed the good scissors.

He nodded toward a dusty wicker chair beside him. "Take the clippers. Clip where I tell you. I need this one ready before my customer shows up, and if you don't butcher it, I'll give you one off that table for free." The table in question held the most absurdly cute little trees I had ever seen in my life, arranged like a kindergarten class photo for plants. A little clipping for one of those? I dove in before he could change his mind.

Half an hour later, the tree was done. Patrick looked at me with an expression I couldn't place. "What," I said, suddenly nervous. "Please tell me I didn't ruin it."

Patrick smirked, that odd sideways smirk of his. "No. You didn't. And that is genuinely unsettling. You did it perfectly. First try. You sure you're not secretly Japanese?"

I was not, but at that point it hardly mattered. Patrick's hand never did heal quite right, nerve damage, the doctors muttered, the kind that ends careers built on precision. His whole livelihood was hanging by a thread thinner than bonsai wire. So I stayed. I potted, I pruned, I wired tiny branches into tinier shapes until they became the small perfect works of art Patrick had in his head all along. He couldn't pay me much, but it was enough to cover a converted-garage apartment nearby the park, which had exactly one working outlet and more character than my old place had in its entire square footage.

Every now and then I still see the young woman from that first day. She's still taking international calls, still arching her back at a truly heroic angle, especially on cold days, which I have decided is simply a fact about the universe and not something I think about more than is strictly healthy. I only ever watch from a distance, though. A woman that goofy? Not really my type.

As for the job, I assume I lost it. Never did bother to check. My cushy, upscale apartment is probably rented out to some other corporate dweeb by now, someone with a working chip and a full calendar and absolutely no idea what's coming.

And if that's you — if you're the poor soul who moved in and found my stupid, useless, missing memory chip wedged behind the radiator or wherever it finally turned up... congratulations, and also, keep it. It never once told me anything worth knowing that a tree, a park, and a bad-tempered bonsai artist with a broken hand couldn't teach me for free.