Sequence Six: Regret And Nostalgia Dot Lyf

The first time Cambry MacDouglas went to Regret And Nostalgia it was due to pure chance.

When Cambry was nineteen, he was, for a time, the object of Justin Regent's affections. More to the point, Cambry was the focus of Regent's attentions -- not that it did either of them any good. Cambry was too inexperienced, not to mention shit-scared of the idea of sex with another man, to respond to Regent's overtures; Regent lost interest after a time, and once they graduated they never laid eyes on one another again.

It was six years later that Cambry, following the breakup of his first significant same-sex relationship, thought back to Regent, and realized what an opportunity he had missed. While he'd focused at the time on his own fears, what he saw only in retrospect was how good it might have been with Regent: He'd been a good-looking lad, but more than that he'd been smart, funny, adventurous, athletic -- all the things that Cambry liked to cultivate about himself and wanted in a mate. He kicked himself over that lost opportunity for years, off and on, and finally -- at age 42, as his midlife crisis was kicking in -- Cambry launched a SocialNet search to try and re-establish contact. After all, who knew? If life had gone well for Regent, he might still be youthful and vital, sexy and strong... like Cambry himself, who had never managed to keep a relationship going for more than a year or so, but had worked hard to keep a grip on his physical vigor and intellectual curiosity.

Entering the name REGENT into the search engine, Cambry hit the EXECUTE key. When links with the word REGRET started popping up, he realized that he'd misspelled the name and the autocorrect had made its best guess; Cambry reached to clear the screen, but then his eye caught on one heading, which included a small box ad beneath.

REGRET AND NOSTALGIA
wws.RegretAndNostalgia.lyf

"Regret and Nostalgia Dot Lyf," Cambry muttered to himself. The wws prefix simply meant it was available on the World Web Service; the dot-lyf suffix wasn't so clear to him, though it seemed familiar. Then Cambry recalled what it was -- a relatively new domain for lifestyle content, including therapy, coaching, fitness, prosperity counseling, and other services.

The box ad drew his eye.

"Plagued by missed chances or unresolved feelings? Hung up on unfinished business or relationships that ended badly? The experts at Regret and Nostalgia have a proven, patented way to ease your mind and erase your pain. Find out what thousands have already discovered: You Can Let Go Again�."

Cambry laughed softly. "The NSA must be up to its old tricks. They know just what I'm thinking," he joked. The National Security Agency had recently been excoriated in the media for yet again -- and this was the sixth or seventh time -- having been found out in a domestic spying program. As with the other times the surveillance was covert, universal, and a matter of monitoring Web activity, though the agency had also been monitoring PCD messages, image sharing, and voice links. But the spying had gone even further than before, with the latest allegations pointing to evidence that the NSA was gathering data straight from people's GPS chips and Health Tracking Implants.

But then Cambry reconsidered. Maybe this was a matter not of spying, but of karma, or good fortune; maybe his fumbled input had been the happy accident that could lead to something more constructive than trying to rekindle an adolescent fling that had never even happened.

For long moments he stared at the air display's holographic field, his lips pursed. Then he tapped on the link, read more about the company, saw that it was local, and initiated a video feed. A young woman's face appeared on the holographic field before him.

"Regret and Nostalgia, Rachel speaking," she said pleasantly.

"Hi..." Cambry hesitated. What should he say? Deciding that this was pretty much the same as calling his health clinic, he added, "I'd like to make an appointment..."

***

The associate's name was Charles Turnell. He was male, about thirty-six, and possessed of a patient, wise air. He heard Cambry's explanation of why he was there, and nodded with understanding.

"Let me ask you a few questions, so that you and I can both clarify your goals," Associate Turnell said. "You're hoping that you can resolve this feeling of having missed a significant opportunity in your romantic life so that you can move ahead and form more lasting, and deeper, bonds."

"I never said that," Cambry began.

The associate smiled. "If fact, Mr. Cambry, that's exactly what you said, even if you didn't realize you were saying it. It's my job to hear, parse, and read between the lines. Your story is full of the pain of a path not taken... a path that could have led someplace you imagine to be so much more satisfying, that you cannot disengage yourself from speculation about it and invest in your immediate circumstances."

"If all that means that I..." Cambry ran out of words. "What does all that mean?"

"It means the man who convinces himself that a chest of gold coins lay mere inches below where he once stopped digging has much less energy to wield pick and shovel in the mine where he now labors," the associate said -- rather gnomically, Cambry thought, but then Cambry had never cared for aphorisms and parables.

"Look, I don't know if this has anything to do with me never managing a lasting relationship," Cambry said, "but I do know that I think about him more than I should. And it's foolish because all these years later, he's not going to be anything like I remember him."

The associate gave him the same calm smile he'd worn since the consultation had begun. "Mr. Cambry," he said, "I think it's time I explained a little more about what we do and why it works."

Cambry watched as the associate repositioned his chair and waved a hand over a glossy Hardglas� inset. A holographic air display wavered into being, a human brain in blue schematic.

"Psychology is partly a matter of memory, but also partly a matter of physiology," the associate told him. "How you think, and even how you feel, can reconfigure your hard wiring over time. It's not enough to coach you with words -- not if you want results in less than, say, a decade. But experience -- now, experience can make a huge difference in a very short time."

"So what I need to do is... have an experience that I didn't have back then?" Cambry asked.

"More or less," the associate said, and then, uncharacteristically, seemed to hurry to make his next point. "But I don't mean you should go out and begin sleeping around. And I don't mean you should hire a fleshflex sex worker or an erotic anthroform who can be made to look like the young man you wish now you'd slept with."

Cambry guessed that was what many clients wondered at this point in the sales pitch.

"No," the associate continued, "I mean this only: It doesn't matter whether experience happens in reality, or in some form of virtual experience. In fact, to the extent that it does matter, it's preferable for experience of this sort to be virtual. Even if we hired an actor or a fleshflex sex worker, or arranged for a sexbot to look like the man in question, you would know it was all matter of play-acting. And you would know you're a 42-year-old man trying to recapture something from his youthful years. The only really therapeutic option here is to retro-create the appropriate experience, and allow you to remember it as you do any other memory: In the context of your life as you have actually lived it."

Cambry peered, frowning and at a loss.

The associate gestured over the Hardglas� inset once again, and an animated graphic started up. The brain schematic zoomed up close, its individual neurons visibly firing with a dancing array of blue sparks. It looked like a cold, beautiful Northern Lights as spotted in a brain-shaped sky. "We pre-program and introduce neuromedical nanoframes," the associate continued. "These are molecule-sized machines, networked so that they carry processing power much more potent than any nano-nit by itself could manage. By interfacing with your brain, the nanoframe generates the experience you wish to have."

"You write the experience in advance and implant it?"

"No," the associate replied, "we don't do that. It would take too much processing power and the specifics might not be quite what you need. What we do is provide the general outline of a story, and your own mind fills in the details. Or, if you like, we provide the canvas and the paint -- and you make the picture you want and need."

"So it's a dream?"

"Similar to a dream," the associate said. "But a dream is a message from your subconscious, related in metaphors. This is a matter of supplied stimulus that you shape and channel yourself into the exact images, actions, and meanings you're looking to have supplied. It's like dreaming a memory instead of a dream... and then, as days go by, the memory entrenches itself into your mind. A dream doesn't do that. A dream evaporates. This new memory, however, remains, and changes how you think, how you feel... who you are."

Cambry still wasn't sure he understood, but he grasped enough of the explanation to sense that a real answer lay within reach. "I'll have the memories I wish I had," he said.

"Yes, and you will have the emotional resolution you need," the associate told him. "You see, regret stems from things we leave unfinished -- experiences half-lived, opportunities declined or missed. Things we said No to when, really, we wanted to say Yes. And nostalgia is similar: It's when we look back at things we only did halfway. We long most strongly for a time in the past that we left too hastily. We miss childhood when we were too impatient about growing up. We pine for a place we visited on a vacation when we didn't fully explore everything that place had to offer. We miss the lover that got away, not because he's now gone so much as because we were still in the process of finding out who he was, and who he made it possible for us to be, when the relationship ended. Human life is a story, but it's a large, multi-faceted story made of many small, overlapping, interlocking stories..." The associate smiled. Cambry hesitantly smiled back.

"All stories need an ending," the associate summarized, "and it's when we don't have those endings that we have emotional pain, sensations of intense loss that refuse to fade away, enduring regrets, stinging nostalgia."

"You can take that away?" Cambry said.

"Not take anything away except the pain," the associate corrected him. "And do that by giving you, now, whatever it is you didn't get at the time."

***

On his second visit to Regret And Nostalgia, Cambry saw a different associate. She stood a head shorter than the one he'd seen before, but she was armed with even more technical information.

"You visited us six years ago," she noted, checking over the data on the air display.

"Yes," Cambry said. "And I felt so much better afterwards that... well, when I realized I had another problem, I... I thought about coming back."

"That is not unusual," the associate said. "As time goes on, we see a larger share of our practice going to repeat clients. Do you remember what it was you came for when you visited us before?"

This point was hazy. Cambry knew it had to do with some sort of regret from his youth... a trip he didn't take, or a word he didn't say to someone and never had the chance do it later. He retained a general sense of what the problem had been, but had no recollection of the specifics.

"That is common," the associate said, after he haltingly did his best to explain. "Once an experiential deficit is corrected, the deficit in question disappears. Satisfying experiences are often rather hazy for us later on, while the ones that leave lingering dissatisfaction have a much sharper focus."

Cambry sighed. "I hope that's true," he said. "I can't sleep, I can't concentrate on my work. I hate myself. I should have known better, but I was thoughtless."

The associate waited for him to clarify.

"I... it was my mother," he said. "I missed her birthday a couple of years ago. And I meant to send a belated greeting, but less than a week after she turned seventy, she died."

"So young," the associate said. "I'm so sorry."

"It was an accidental cerebral something..."

"Cerebral vascular accident? A stroke?"

"Yes. That's what the pathologist said."

"And you regret how you neglected her."

"Yes."

"Mr. Cambry, I am so sorry for your loss. We cannot give you the illusion that a dead love one is still alive. But we can help resolve the pain of unfinished business by giving you the raw materials of new memories that you custom-create for yourself."

She went on to explain about the nanoframes and how his own subconscious would accept the outlines of a reparative memory, and fill in the gaps to create a recollection indistinguishable from a natural memory. That created memory would, in turn, bolster his perceptions of his experiences since then, and re-shape his feelings about himself and the world around him in the present day.

"But isn't that cheating? Isn't that lying? Isn't that taking a shortcut after the fact to self-forgiveness, instead of living with the fact that I am such a shit I let my mother die before I gave her that tiny little bit of common consideration?"

The associate's serene smile never wavered. "Some critics say that we deprive our clients of life lessons. They even speculate that we make people less ethical because they unlearn from their mistakes. But tell me this: What good does your self-excoriation do? How can it help your mother to forego treatment? Would she really want for you to be so miserable? Isn't it possible that you are learning the wrong message right now: That you are a bad person? Maybe you could learn a better lesson instead: How glad you are that you got her a nice birthday greeting just before she died. How important it is to stay on top of the work involved with maintaining close ties to the people you love."

Cambry thought that over for a long while. Then he said, "Let's do it."

***

Cambry came back for a third session when he turned fifty-four. And then again, just three years later. And yet again, just after his retirement, at age sixty-seven. Like many clients of Regret and Nostalgia, his needs centered around things he hadn't managed to completely achieve in some limited space of time, or else things he'd forsaken before he quite realized that, in fact, he wanted them quite badly.

The earlier case was a photograph he'd missed: He had been on a street in Mumbai, in rare synchrony with his opticam, light and color and composition miraculously harmonious in every shot he committed to his 9K viz-chip. Then he had caught sight of two carpenters in an alley, scraping and sanding boards, soft wood shavings falling around their bare feet. The details were stark and eidetic; the folds of the men's tunics fell about their lean bodies as they worked, recalling the voluptuous shapelines of a Renaissance painting. The opticam chose that moment to shut itself down, and the moment slipped away.

Of all the hundreds of brilliant images he captured that day, this was the one that haunted him and burned him up with regret. The nanoframe tweaked his recollections so that Cambry thought he'd taken the photo and then kept it back from publication as a personal favorite. Once a year for several years (or so it went in the new memory) he had dug the photo out to give it a once-over, just to make sure that it really was as good as he recalled; he'd looked it over so often he knew its every nuance and chromatone, and he no longer felt the need to scrutinize it. Just knowing the image was there in his archive, perfect as the day he'd captured it, was enough... even though, of course, the photo did not exist, and neither had he ever called it up, in reality, to enjoy it.

The other incident centered around a week spent away from home, when he'd met a man named Xhar who was so different from Chad -- Cambry's husband of eighteen years at that point -- and yet, so similar to a younger Chad, that cheating with Xhar for a long, torrid week felt almost like an homage to Chad... Chad as he might have been; Chad as he had been a decade earlier. But upon his return home, Cambry's guilt and anxiety so overwhelmed him that he needed, if not to eradicate the experience, then to overwrite certain particulars. The reconfigured memory, strange to say, left in the sex, but made the Xhar less like Chad, so that it no longer seemed like Cambry was setting his husband as he was against his husband as he could have been, and took away the shame of comparing Chad unfavorably to Xhar. That, as it happened, was the source of the betrayal: A disloyal feeling that Chad could have been better, like Xhar was better, if he were fitter, or younger, or more cheerful.

As for the retirement-related visit? Nothing but a resolution of a general sense that Cambry had not proven himself as valuable to the media company he worked for as he wanted, even though he'd won a clutch of industry and artistic awards. This traced back to an early life experience -- preschool, in fact. It was a simple fix, even though it slightly reconfigured many, many memories across a lifetime. It took a long while for the retrenchment process to finalize, and Cambry experienced more vivid dreams than the typical procedure involved and even endured a panic attack that might, or might not, have been related to the procedure... but it worked. It always worked.

No matter what the problem, no matter what Cambry told them, the associates were shocked by nothing, puzzled by nothing. The details of each case were particular to Cambry alone, but the general nature of the needs that brought him back time and again was, they assured him, fairly standard.

And then there was his final visit. What brought him back that one last time was a near universal complaint among the company's repeat clientele.

***

"I see you have visited us a number of times before, Mr. Cambry," the associate, a graying but still quite striking woman, remarked. "What brings you here today?" -- though she thought she already knew.

Cambry sighed. "It's hard to explain... I've lived a good life, and I have no regrets. But at the same time..." He fell silent.

After half a minute had passed, the associate picked up the conversational thread. "I see you are eighty-nine years old, Mr. Cambry."

"Almost ninety," he replied.

"Tell me a little about your life so far. What's stood out for you? What's given your life shape and meaning?"

Cambry slowly shook his head, and then gave a shrug. "I think that's why I'm here," he admitted. "There's nothing, really, that makes me feel like my life reached deeply or ever caught fire. I had a successful career and my work has been put up in galleries and hoarded by collectors. I'm well off financially. I got married later in life than most people, but my marriage has lasted, where other couples have long since split. I've been happy... well, content. But only content. Always gliding on an even keel. It feels like I have just sailed through my life. Like I never was really challenged. Like it's all been... all just been too..." Words failed him once again.

"Too easy?" the associate suggested.

"Yes, I think so. I think that might be it. I'm not really sure. But too anodyne, anyway, too glossy, too shallow." Cambry sought after words that would express his sense of restless discontent. "What am I really made of? What are my limits? I feel like I never tested them, and now I'm so old I'll never know."

"I think I can help you today," the associate said. "Shall I explain the process?"

Cambry shook his head. "I don't really care. I just... want to feel better. I just want to feel... something. I don't think I ever really have. I don't think I really am happy, because -- how would I know? I'm not sure I've ever been sad, or ashamed, or even disappointed. I have no cause for complaint, and yet everything feels so empty."

The associate got him set up with the neurotherapeutic cerebrex, and keyed him into her megaframe. She called up his old records -- all the memories that the company had reconfigured, all the before-and-after datasets, all the nanoframe downlinks that documented the back-and-forth between the networked micro-machines and Cambry's brain. Rechecking the feeds and settings, the associate turned her always-serene smile to the lightly sedated older man.

"Be healed," she said, and, selecting the "undo all" option, hit the EXECUTE key.