Angel Stations by Gary Gibson

her like he was waiting for an answer. She shook her head.
    ‘You I don’t get. I heard of people like you, and what you’re doing isn’t even against anybody’s laws. But what you’re doing to yourself is suicide, plain and simple – the worst kind. Losing your own memories for somebody else’s.’
    ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘I don’t need lectures.’ And with that, an image sprang into her mind: a grinning face with a bright red shock of hair. Then the same face shouting at her to get out, and she pushed it down, hard, hard.
    ‘I still have some distillate of the memories I need,’ she said, picturing the vials of precious liquid in her mind, tucked away in her quarters.
    The distillate technology allowed raw memories to be siphoned in liquid form from a person’s bioware and turned into Books – small, easily digested pills. Anyone else with the same bioware could then consume these pills, and thereby relive the memories and experiences of whoever the distillate had originally been taken from.
    Having the bioware, Kim had found, was the easy part. Getting the raw distillate turned into something she could actually use was an entirely different matter. The distilleries were astonishingly expensive – and very hard to get access to if you didn’t have fully authorized documentation. There was one on board the Station, in a highly secure area to which she, as a regular civilian, did not have access.
    There were ways, of course. Bill was one of those ways. She had enough distillate to last her a long time, but the levels of bribery involved in getting the Books processed into a usable form meant she could only afford to have relatively few manufactured at a time.
    ‘As long as they’re keeping those artefacts up there in Command, they’ll be watching everybody going in and out of there like a hawk. But I might be able to do something for you – if you can do something for me. A favour?’
    Kim regarded Bill with a wary expression. ‘What kind of favour?’
    He reached into his pocket and brought out a tiny plastic case. ‘I knew you’d been looking for me, and heard you’d just got back. It’s like this.’ His voice dropped to a semi-conspiratorial whisper, and she leaned towards him a little. ‘I’m not telling you who made the find because if it gets out, it might end up being traced back to me. Seems someone working inside Command suggested a little unofficial deal. If they could be provided with a tiny quantity of the memory distillate, the person who made the discovery got a little cash above and beyond what the joint Government committees might provide.’
    Kim nodded. She could well imagine what untried – even alien – memory distillate could fetch on the black market, especially when the official channels wouldn’t be able to match the price.
    ‘Well, that person talked to the rock hermit in question, and then that same person talked to me, and then we had a couple of drops of that distillate made into Books. Unfortunately, you’re the only person around here who’s got the necessary read/write bioware to tell us what’s in them without crying wolf. So how about a couple of those to tide you over?’
    Kim felt like crying. ‘Bill, this isn’t something you snort or stick in your arm. For God’s sake, it’s chemical Books. It’s memories and experiences. It’s not a drug, it doesn’t work the same way.’
    ‘Baby,’ he said, ‘it’s all about escape, one way or another, isn’t it?’ he said, smiling. Kim said nothing, knowing he was perfectly right, dead on target. It was always about escape – only the means varied. But knowing that made no difference to her own very real need.
    ‘Look,’ he said, keeping his voice soft and low, ‘you know how it works out there, bouncing from rock to rock with nothing to do but talk to a bunch of other deranged Goblin jockeys. There are no secrets. And these guys,’ he said, nodding discreetly towards a bunch of military-looking types