The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories by Walter Jon Williams

butter and garlic, tossed salad, bread. Davout waited until it was half consumed, and the bottle of wine mostly gone, before he dared to speak again of his sib.
    "You mentioned the Silent One and his theories," he said. "I'm thirty years behind on his downloads, and I haven't read his latest work—what is he up to? What's all this theorizing about?"
    She sighed, fingers ringing a frustrated rhythm on her glass. Looked out the window for a moment, then conceded. "Has he mentioned the modular theory of the psyche?"
    Davout tried to remember. "He said something about modular memory , I seem to recall."
     "That's a part of it. It's a fairly radical theory that states that people should edit their personality and abilities at will, as circumstances dictate. That one morning, say, if you're going to work, you upload appropriate memories, and work skills, along with a dose of ambition, of resolution, and some appropriate emotions like satisfaction and eagerness to solve problems, or to endure drudgery, as the case may be."
    Davout looked at his plate. "Like cookery, then," he said. "Like this dish—veal, carrots, onions, celery, mushrooms, parsley."
    Fair Katrin made a mudra that Davout didn't recognize. he signed.
    "Oh. Apologies. That one means, roughly, 'har-de-har-har.'" Fingers formed , then , then slurred them together. "See?"
     He poured more wine into her glass.
    She leaned forward across her plate. "Recipes are fine if one wants to be consumed ," she said. "Survival is another matter. The human mind is more than just ingredients to be tossed together. The atomistic view of the psyche is simplistic, dangerous, and wrong . You cannot will a psyche to be whole, no matter how many wholeness modules are uploaded. A psyche is more than the sum of its parts."
    Wine and agitation burnished her cheeks. Conviction blazed from her eyes. "It takes time to integrate new experience, new abilities. The modular theorists claim this will be done by a 'conductor,' an artificial intelligence that will be able to judge between alternate personalities and abilities and upload whatever's needed. But that's such rubbish , I—" She looked at the knife she was waving, then permitted it to return to the table.
    "How far are the Silent One and his cohorts toward realizing this ambition?" Davout said.
     She looked at him. "I didn't make that clear?" she said. "The technology is already here. It's happening. People are fragmenting their psyches deliberately and trusting to their conductors to make sense of it all. And they're happy with their choices, because that's the only emotion they permit themselves to upload from their supply." She clenched her teeth, glanced angrily out the window at the Vieux Quartier's sunset-burnished walls. "All traditional psychology is aimed at integration, at wholeness. And now it's all to be thrown away  . . . " She flung her hand out the window. Davout's eyes automatically followed an invisible object on its arc from her fingers toward the street.
    "And how does this theory work in practice?" Davout asked. "Are the streets filled with psychological wrecks?"
    Bitterness twisted her lips. "Psychological imbeciles, more like. Executing their conductors' orders, docile as well-fed children, happy as clams. They upload passions—anger, grief, loss—as artificial experiences, secondhand from someone else, usually so they can tell their conductor to avoid such emotions in the future. They are not people anymore, they're . . . " Her eyes turned to Davout.
    "You saw the Silent One," she said. "Would you call him a person?"
    "I was with him for only a day," Davout said. "I noticed something of a . . . " he signed, searching for the word.
    "Lack of affect?" she interposed. "A demeanor marked by an extreme placidity?"
     he signed.
    "When it was clear I wouldn't come back to him, he wrote me out of his memory,"