“Neither did I.”

“Then why do you — why did you — fight with Dad? I have never understood.”

“I’m sorry it caused you pain, Brian. But we were two different kinds of people. Our marriage was as sound as most, sounder maybe since we didn’t expect too much of each other. But we had little in common intellectually. And once you joined us I began to feel a little like a fifth wheel.”

“Are you blaming me for something, Dolly?”

“No. Quite the opposite. I’m blaming me for not making everything work out for the best. Maybe I was jealous of all the attention he lavished on you, how close you two were and how left out I felt.”

“Dolly! I’ve always — loved you. You are the closest thing to a real mother I have ever had. I don’t remember my mother at all. They told me I was only a year old when she died.”

“Thanks for saying that, Brian,” she said with a slight smile. “It really is a little too late to assign blame. In any case I and your father separated, had a very amicable divorce a few years later. I went back to live with my family, got a new job and that is where I am now.” Sudden anger flared and she turned on Snaresbrook.

“There it is, Doctor. Is that what you want? Or a bit more guts spilled on the floor.”

“Brian has the physical age of twenty-four,” she said calmly. “But his memories stop at age fourteen.”

“Oh, Brian — I am so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t, Dolly. I suppose that everything you have just told me about was in the wind and I should have seen it coming. I don’t know. I guess kids think that nothing basic will ever change. It’s just that school is so busy, the AI work so exciting—” He broke off and turned to Dr. Snaresbrook. “Am I at least fifteen by now, Doctor? I’ve certainly learned a lot in the past few minutes.”

“It doesn’t quite work that way, Brian. You heard a lot — but you don’t have your own memories of the events. That’s what we must restore next.”

“How?”

“By using this machine. Which I am very proud to say you helped to develop. I am going to stimulate memories which you will identify. The computer will keep track of everything. When other memories have been matched on both sides of the lesion they will be reconnected.”

“There can’t be enough wires in the world to reconnect all the nerves in the brain. Aren’t there something like ten-to-the-twelfth hookups?”

“There are — but there are plenty of redundancies as well. Associations with one sector of memory will permit compatible reinforcement. The brain is very much like a computer and the opposite is true as well. But it is important to always be aware of the differences. Memory is static in a computer — but not in the human mind. Recalled memories get stronger, untouched memories weaken and vanish. My hope is mat when enough pathways have been reconnected, other interconnections will be reestablished as well. We will be looking for nemes.”

“What are nemes?”

“A neme is a bundle of nerve fibers that is connected to a variety of agents, each of whose output represents a fragment of an idea or a state of mind. For example, what is red and round, with a sweet taste and a crunchy texture, a fruit about the size of your fist and…”

“Apple!” Brian said happily.

“That’s exactly what I had in mind, but notice I never used that word.”

“But it’s the only thing that fits.”

“Yes, indeed — but you’d only know that if you had an ‘apple-agent’ that was connected so that it would automatically get activated when enough of the right other nemes are activated — like the ones for red, round, sweet and fruit.”

“And also cherries. I must have nemes for cherries too.”

“You do. That’s why I added ‘fist-sized.’ But you didn’t have those nemes two months ago. Or, rather, you certainly had some apple-nemes, but their inputs weren’t wired up right. So you didn’t recognize that description before, until we connected them up during therapy.”

“Strange. I don’t remember that at all. Wait. Of course I can’t remember that. It happened before you restored my memory. You can’t remember anything until you have some memory.”

Snaresbrook was becoming accustomed to that startling sharpness, but it still kept taking her by surprise. But she continued in the same manner. “So that is how nemes hook up. By making the right kinds of input and output connections. So far, we’ve been able to do this for the most common nemes — the ones that every child learns. But now we’ll be looking for more and more complex nemes and discover how they connect as well. I want to find higher and higher levels of your ideas, concepts and relationships. These will be increasingly harder to locate and describe, because we’ll be getting into more areas that are unique to your own development, ideas that were known to you and you alone, for which there are no common words. When we find them, it may be impossible for me — or anyone else — to understand what they mean to you. But that won’t matter because you will be learning more every day. Every time the correlation machine discovers ten new nemes, it will have to consider a thousand other possible agents to connect them to. And every twenty nemes could trigger a million such possibilities.”

“Exponential, that’s what you mean?”

“Perfectly correct.” She smiled with pleasure. “It would seem that we’re well on our way to restoring your mathematical ability.”

“What will I have to do?”

“Nothing for now, you’ve had a long enough day for the first session.”

“No, I haven’t. I feel fine. And don’t you want to work with my new information in case it slides away when I go to sleep? You were the one who told me that a given period of time must pass before my short-term memory becomes long-term memory.”

Erin Snaresbrook chewed her lip, chewed at this idea. Brian was right. They ought to get on with the process as soon as possible. She turned to Dolly.

“Can you be here tomorrow? Same time?”

“If you want me.” Her voice was very cold.

“I do, Dolly. Not only do I want you but I need you. I know you must feel upset about this — but I hope that you won’t forget the boy Brian once was. Brian the man is still Brian the child whom you took into your home. You can help me make him whole again.”

“Of course, Doctor, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t think of myself, should I? Until tomorrow, then.”

They were both silent until the door closed behind her.

“Guilt,” Brian said. “The priest was always talking about it, the nuns in school too. Expiation as well. You know, I don’t think that I ever called her Mother. Or Mom like the other kids — or even Mammy the way we do in Ireland.”

“No blame or remorse, Brian. You are not living in your past but are re-creating it. What’s done is done. Cold logic, as you always told me.”

“Did I say that?”

“All the time when we were working together on the machine — when my thought processes got woolly. You were very firm about it.”

“I should have been. It saved my life once.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Nope. It’s part of my past, remembered in all too clear embarrassment. The time when I let a bit of stupid emotion get a hold of me. Can we move on, please? What’s next?”

“I’m going to plug you into the computer again. Ask you questions, establish connections, stimulate areas of your brain near the trauma and record your reactions.”

“Then let’s go then — hook them up.”

“Not at once, not until we have established a bigger data base.”

“Get things rolling then, Doctor. Please. I am looking forward to growing up again. You said we worked together before?”

“For almost three years. You told me that my brain research helped you with your AI. You certainly helped me develop the machine. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Three years. Since I was twenty-one. What did I call you then?”

“Erin. That’s my first name.”