1. Zima Blue：

A synaesthetic bridge allowed him to hear visual data as a kind of music, to see sounds as a symphony of startling colours.

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When you recall something - this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now - there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance to reality. Yet you'd swear your recollection was accurate.'

'But if the AM had accompanied me, I'd have a flawless record of how things really were.'

'You would,' Zima said. 'But that isn't living memory. It's photography: a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination, leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered.' He paused long enough to top off my glass. 'Imagine that on nearly every occasion when you had cause to sit outside on an afternoon like this you had chosen red wine over white, and generally had no reason to regret that choice. But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white - against the judgement of the AM - and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening.'

'It might not have had anything to do with my choice of wine,' I said.

'No,' Zima agreed. 'And the AM certainly wouldn't attach any significance to that one happy combination of circumstances. A single deviation wouldn't affect its predictive model to any significant degree. It would still say "red wine" the next time you asked.'

I felt an uncomfortable tingle of understanding. 'But human memory wouldn't work that way.'

'No. It would latch on to that one exception and attach undue significance to it. It would amplify the attractive parts of the memory of that afternoon and suppress the less pleasant parts: the fly that kept buzzing in your face, your anxiety about catching the boat home and the birthday present you knew you had to buy in the morning. All you'd remember was that golden glow of well-being. The next time, you might well choose white, and the time after. An entire pattern of behaviour would have been altered by one instance of deviation. The AM would never tolerate that. You'd have to go against its advice many, many times before it grudgingly updated its model and started suggesting white rather than red.'

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'All the difference in the world,' Zima said. 'The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion.'

'Fallible,' I said.

'But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.'

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These tiles are coloured Zima Blue,' I said.

'Zima Blue is the colour of the tiles,' he gently corrected. 'It just happened to be the shade that the young man used for his swimming pool tiles.'

'Then some part of you remembered.'

'This was where I began. A crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself around a swimming pool. But it was my world. It was all I knew, all I needed to know.'

'And now?' I asked, already fearing the answer.

'Now I'm going home.'

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But I knew the truth. I knew it as I watched Zima stand at the edge of the pool and surrender himself to the blue. He'd told me exactly how it would happen: the slow, methodical shutting-down of higher-brain functions. It hardly mattered that it was all irreversible: there wouldn't be enough of him left to regret what he had lost.

But something would remain - a little kernel of being - enough of a mind to recognise its own existence. Enough of a mind to appreciate its surroundings, and to extract some trickle of pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task, no matter how purposeless. He wouldn't ever need to leave the pool. The solar patches would provide him with all the energy he needed. He would never age, never grow ill. Other machines would take care of his island, protecting the pool and its silent, slow swimmer from the ravages of weather and time.

Centuries would pass.

Thousands of years, and then millions.

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They've read my article now, most of them, so they know what that slowly swimming figure means . . . but they still don't come in droves. The stands are always a little echoey and sad, even on a good day. But I've never seen them completely empty, which I suppose is some kind of testament. Some people get it. Most people never will.

But that's art.

——Alastair Reynolds