Carmen reborn

It was painfully early in the morning. We had hours till the sun rose.

The door swung open. "Mom, I'm here for my passport," yelled Carmen, walking into the darkened house. Then she added with a mutter, "Don't bother getting up."

When she hit the light switch, however, she didn't understand what she was seeing. Charlotte was been something of a hoarder, but now, everything was gone, except the sofa. The bare walls and carpets were a clean white, years of unwashed grime gone; the house smelled like Pine-Sol.

Carmen had never seen her home like this before today.

"Morning, Carmen," I said, stepping out from the dining room with a steaming mug of coffee.

She gaped blearily at me in surprise. "The fuck? Mac? What are you doing in my house?"

I waved for her to come with me and stepped back through the dining room. "Let's talk over a cup of coffee."

But Carmen didn't take a single step to follow me. "No. You're going to tell me what's going on, right fucking now."

"Hard way, huh? It's okay. I get it.” I sighed. “It's always been the hard way for you. I didn't really expect anything different."

Carmen gave me a sideways look, weirded out. Then awful realization dawned on her. The clean house, my mysterious appearance, and probably the fact her cantankerous mother had yet to make an appearance, she linked it all together. "Mac,” she said, “what did you?"

I smiled. "You'll see soon enough. I promise I'll give you everything your parents never did." I gave a curt, commanding nod. "Leah?"

Leah, barefoot, wearing a low-cut frilly little maid outfit, stood silently behind Carmen. She held the VR helmet in both hands. She lowered it onto her friend's head like a crown.

Carmen's eyes widened, and she turned, but too late. Dazzling, rapidly flashing images instantly began siphoning out her mind.

Unbeknownst to Carmen, the smartwatch she'd bought ‘on impulse’ a few days ago was already paired to the to the VR headset. It fed it every bit of data to the AI the program needed to ensnare her.

Immediately Carmen went limp. Leah caught her former classmate mid fall and gently lowered her to the floor.

The truth was, Carmen hadn’t lost her passport, or left it in her mom’s house. In reality, it was tucked safely in my back pocket. A couple days back, I’d paid a visit to her apartment and stolen it.

Carmen’s memories on my computer provided all the information required to pull off the theft: her address and apartment number, the code to the building, her roommate’s schedule, and exactly where Carmen stored her passport for the upcoming trip (under her bed in a plastic box).

From there, it was a simple matter of showing up at her front door while her roommate was out. I pretended to want to talk about Leah, then segued into asking Carmen to help test my VR image sorting project. Once she was under, I collected her passport, implanted the false memory of phoning her mom to confirm her passport was sitting on her bed in her old room, and agreeing to stop by the morning of her trip to pick it up.

I walked over to the dining room table, where my computer was running, to confirm all of Carmen's memories had been removed. I saved this most recent backup of her mind.

It wasn’t only her passport I’d stolen, now. I’d stolen Carmen herself.

I returned to the entryway with my laptop, where I collected the headset and smartwatch off Carmen’s **** body . Leah hovered nearby in case she was needed.

"Keep an eye on Carmen,” I ordered. “ I’ll need a minute to figure out her friend.”

Leah dipped downward in a curtsey, head bowed. “Yes, Master.”

I strode outside into the cold gray pre-dawn with my equipment. A white Toyota Corolla idled on the curb with headlights on. Carmen owned a motorcycle, not a car, so this had to be the friend she’d invited to Europe in Leah’s stead.

I rapped on the window with a knuckle, and the girl inside rolled the window down.

–

Ten minutes later, I returned to the house with Carmen’s luggage in tow. Her friend, meanwhile, drove away believing Carmen left on the trip with Leah.

“Help me move her to the couch,” I said, setting the small suitcase and backpack aside to take hold of Carmen’s shoulders. Leah picked up her feet, and together we carried the **** co-ed into the living room where we laid her down on the sofa.

Carmen was much heavier than Leah or Hana, having more height and muscle mass, but she wasn’t unmanageable.

"Help me undress her," I said.

"Yes Master." Leah dutifully came to my side and propped up Carmen while I removed her clothing.

Carmen's leather jacket, smelling of cigarettes, was tossed into a hamper. Her graphic band tank top and bra joined it - they smelled no less strongly of tobacco. Topless, we laid her back down - her large breasts, unrestrained, spread and retreated into her armpits. I gave her thick, soft nipples each a gentle flick - they stiffened reflexively.

I shook myself free from Carmen's tempting body, and focused back on the task. I collected her keys, wallet, and cellphone from her jean pockets (cigarettes and passport were also removed), while Leah unlaced her high-tops and removed her socks.

The last step was pulling off Carmen's jeans. This was a two-man job.

I unbuckled her belt and unzipped her. Then Leah stepped in and held up her ankles, while I worked the jeans down down her long, smooth, toned legs. Mmh. I ran my hands along those legs, too. While I was down there, I also shimmied Carmen's athletic gray boy shorts over her hips and out from under her butt, exposing her furry bush and surprisingly cute pink pussy. We freed her of the last of her garments and tossed them into the hamper as well.

Carmen was left totally naked, free of her smoke-contaminated clothing. Leah took the hamper away, while I placed the helmet back on the naked girl’s head.

Turning my attention to my computer, I opened a file named Project 3. Inside were about 100 compressed memory packets. I moused over a packet named ‘Day 0’ and dragged it over into the empty window representing Carmen’s blank brain.

The packet continued only a scant handful of simple files. They were Carmen’s memories from when she was four months old.

As I’d discovered while sorting through the contents Carmen’s mind, the human brain didn't hold onto such early recollections very well. These first memories were in poor condition. They were fragmented, rusty, vague, and their few surviving tags were so worn down by the passage of time they were left with barely any weight at all.

I wanted Carmen to relive her childhood. And for that purpose, her memories as they were had to be judged wholly unsuitable. If I set Carmen up with those memories as they were, she’d be no different than Leah when I’d removed all of her memories - an unresponsive vegetable.

So, I’d undertaken the herculean effort of restoration.

The first memories I’d worked were also the most difficult. I had no idea what I was doing. No process to refer to, no experience to call on. But little by little I developed an effective procedure.

Charlotte served as my Rosetta Stone. For important overlapping memories, I used my copy of Carmen’s mother to see what should be present, what shouldn't be, and to infill gaps with accurate details. Of course, a baby doesn’t experience the world in the same way an adult does, but Carmen retained a few high-quality early memories I could reference. From there, I sharpened details, adjusted emotional weights to more ‘recent’ levels, and added back in those tags which seemed obviously missing.

Just to be sure I was doing things right and not hallucinating progress, I’d met with a couple of my old friends who were now parents, and surreptitiously collected a few scans from their families so I could measure by an age-appropriate yardstick.

In the end, the resulting restored memories from Carmen were deceptively simple. The scenes were raw and emotional: eating good food, bad food; grasping at and bashing toys together; learning to crawl.

Each memory usually was tagged only with one two primal descriptors each; like JOY, ANGER, SADNESS, or LOVE. There were fewer concrete details, more broad-descriptors, than you’d see in a typical adult memory. This made them tricky to edit, since predicting which details would stand out to an infant, and which emotions to attribute to which situations, was chaotic and unintuitive.

Even so, the first results were spectacular. If that sounds arrogant, I don’t care. It was damned impressive. The infant memories I’d restored from Carmen were near indistinguishable from the real thing.

The real problem wasn’t quality like I’d originally thought, but time. It’d taken me days to work through seven memories, when there were nearly twenty-times that number to work through from the same time period. It seemed my options were either to proceed with a far smaller memory base, or to call off the experiment then and there.

The solution had been with me the whole time.

What I didn’t realize until later was that throughout my restoration effort, the program's AI element watched me work as it ran in the background. It learned the pattern for which edits I made, and why. It observed me referencing Charlotte’s memories, and the other scans, and the tweaks I performed immediately afterwards to Carmen’s rusted memories.

The very day I sat down to decide whether to proceed with fewer memories, or to choose on a different path for Carmen, a new tool option spontaneously added itself to other program’s GUI, called Memory Repair. Mousing over, it even displayed a tooltip, “Select any number of source files to repair, along with all relevant reference files.”

I immediately tested the tool on the rest of Carmen’s early memories. My computer crunched through in minutes what would have taken me weeks. And checking the results, I found them no worse than my own efforts.

Essentially, I’d taught my program through my work. It was learning.

Though there were still fiddly details even the AI couldn’t predict. Carmen’s memories, even restored to full resolution, simply wouldn’t work as they were. That’s where my find-and-replace algorithm came into play.

I executed a variety of commands on Carmen’s early memories to prepare them for today, for the start of our little test.

Her interactions with her parents had to go, so go they went.

With a little AI image editing, I modified every .gif of Carmen’s father to show a .gif of me, instead. I did the same with Charlotte, replacing her face with Erin’s likeness. As for times when Carmen cried, and no one answered? Times Carmen's parents yelled at each other, and her? I removed everything her parents did which left a later scar.

I’d left a few final touches, as well. I cut out most of Carmen’s early tags of fear, loneliness, and sadness. No one’s upbringing is perfect so I left some experiences in, but I trimmed out a good 80% of the difficulties I found. I also changed Carmen’s perspective in the memories so it wasn’t that of having a baby body, but the fully-grown body she possessed today.

The resulting memories represented the first 4 months of the project, our Day 0. And these repaired, modified, and test-adjusted memories - no others - were what went back into Carmen’s emptied head to start.