FICTION

Inheritance

By Imogen Osborne     VOLUME 59 No. 1

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We were mad at Mom because she didn’t want to upload her brain to the internet. In the cabin, she leaned her weight against the doorway that led to the newly built sunroom. Her shoulders were swimmer-broad from homesteading. Backlit, she looked kind of herculean. Then she stepped into the dark kitchen and was our mom again, small and hardy in a faded smock and leather sandals.

In the past, when I’ve wanted to enact radical change upon my life, I’ve switched up my birth control or tried opting for gluten-free pasta. My sister usually just buys a new outfit for Betsy, her geriatric chihuahua. As of late, she’s been dressed in snug nylon bat wings attached to her belly with ruched elastic. Betsy was wearing said wings on the drive up to the cabin from Manhattan. Halfway through day two, she puked a heterogeneous beige liquid into a half-empty takeaway cup. My sister tried to toss the contents out the passenger window, but she’s got short arms and couldn’t reach out far enough, so Betsy-vomit ended up baking against the heat of the car door for the rest of the drive.

Mom’s version of changing things up was vacating city life and starting again in the depths of the Minnesotan wilderness, slowly working her way up from hammock and rain tarp to modest yurt then finally off-grid cabin decked out with solar-powered string lights. A decade later, she had running water and a wood-burning stove and sun-creased skin and chipped front teeth and stories about bears and bobcats and coyotes. She still had two daughters, but we were much less daughterly these days.

“How’s your father?” Mom asked.

“He’s fine,” my sister said. Ever cephalopodic, our dad had retreated into his study at home, mainly just gazing into his books or out into the suburb and beyond, mainly just waiting for Mom to come back.

Mom’s questions were brief, our answers adjacent—paleo; still single; twice a day; only in an emergency; September deadline. We skirted around the reason for the visit—a last-ditch attempt to get Mom chipped.

My sister and I had both had the procedure. They put your head in a metal cone and stamped a seed into your chin with a needle. Dizziness likely. Perhaps a little nausea. And then you wait. I don’t know how The Company figures out which of your memories is the happiest one, but they do. Then, after you die, they use their algorithms to slurp it out of your brain, or up from their data center maybe. Either way, it gets converted to a video file and pinged over to next of kin. That’s the product: a little MP4 recording of your happiest-ever moment, for your family to watch over and over and over. The videos are super high resolution, like those David Attenborough docs where you can see everything, right down to the pulpy texture of a fish’s iris. Mom left just as the tech was getting approved. I remember it so clearly: Mac Harlow’s face on every newspaper, billboard, television screen, then Mom’s coat missing from the pegs, fresh weeds inching out of the gravel where her car used to sit.

I watched Mom move to the sink and fill an old honey jar with clouded water. Then she began arranging clippings of wildflowers I couldn’t name but liked the look of. The cabin had a bottle-worthy smell, earthy and kinetic, a kind of productive decay. Mom set the little flower vase on the table. Then she stood awkwardly in front of me and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear; it was almost, nearly like before.

On the whole, people’s happiest moments—we call them hap-mos for short—look pretty similar. Birth of the eldest child; first dance at the wedding; when she said yes, whatever. What’s really special is the way The Company’s technology is able to capture and distribute the unique emotion experienced by whoever’s memory it is. Viewers get to experience a kind of high as we watch each memory unfold. Not the same happiness as the subject, not quite; it’s something different when you’re feeling it secondhand, but it’s still good. For me the feeling manifests as pinpricks in the very center of my pupils. Then it seeps down the inside of my face, like crying tears, but backward. A feeling of total warmth and clarity. And watching the hap-mos has nutritional value too. It’s literally good for you. The Company claims that if you consume enough of them, fresh neural pathways get forged in the brain, kind of like solving a sudoku puzzle.

Obviously, sometimes, like with any new technology, there are controversies. One time a middle-aged man sat down to watch his father’s happiest moment only to discover—in thirty hair-raising seconds—that his father was nothing short of a sadist. The worst part was she wasn’t even dead when he did it to her. Birch branches, they said. And that was his happiest moment. Seriously. The old man couldn’t be convicted posthumously, but the footage solved an ancient cold case and the victim’s family sued The Company for millions. But they managed to flip the story on its head—now The Company has some open-access deal with the cops, meaning hap-mos are always solving crimes these days.

“Lots of yard work to be doing,” Mom said, pulling on her boots and ushering us to do the same. We tumbled outside where the sun was sinking its teeth into the garden. Beyond the cabin, a few raised beds staggered into concentrated forest.

My sister and I are premium subscribers. This means we have our own chips inserted but we also have online access to a library of reels. Other people’s hap-mos—just snippets of them, obviously. The Company can’t share the whole thing for privacy reasons, but they merge highlights together in a weekly montage. It’s not cheap, but my god, it’s worth it.

“Squash, kohlrabi, fava beans, cucumber, jalapenos,” Mom was saying, pointing across the network of beds. Flowers too: “Cosmos, marigolds . . .  ”

It’s kind of like a trippy highlight reel. My sister and I like to scroll before bed. She says it’s a form of meditation—a way to flush the subway smog from our pores. Ablution, she said once, and I liked that. Our all-time favorites are when families get reunited; we get such a kick from seeing that look in their eyes, and the weird way their postures shift as though recognition is unfurling from their shoulder sockets.

“Coneflower, anemone . . .  ” Mom kept pointing until a breeze hushed her voice. The names clung briefly to each flower, then dissolved. One of the flowers had five white petals arranged around a black center. It looked kind of like a raw eyeball attached to a long, green stem.



“Nature’s eating Mom,” my sister whispered to me from our sleeping bags on the sunroom floor that night. My sister had a habit of saying either very stupid or very profound things with next to nothing in between. Like the first time we’d stood on Mom’s plot of land, back in the hammock days. Late spring. Shoots erupted from the earth like the mess at the back of an embroidery. I wanted to flip the forest carpet upside down, find a price tag or a barcode or something else to make the whole chaos of it contract into something legible.

That first day, my sister had looked around the stubby plot and said, “This is a new kind of green. Like the light lives inside it.” Then she’d plucked a rubbery leaf from a nearby sapling and scratched a fingernail there until the flesh began to crinkle and a verdant jelly spored from the incision. “There it is,” she’d said, catching the glint on her finger. And she was right. Mom had swapped safe green for scary green. The homely, present tense green of suburbia for an unsettling shade of pluperfect green buried amongst the undergrowth, the kind that couldn’t really be understood, just acclimatized to over time.

“What do you mean?” I whispered back eventually. I was trying to ignore the scratching noise on the boards all around, wondering if I’d rather it be roaches or mice, wondering whether we should have opted for the tent outside instead and accepted the inevitable pad-pad prowl of the black bears. Betsy was snoring nearby.

“Do we even need to talk about the way she killed those chickens?”

We’d spent the day weeding, mulching, and harvesting, mainly. It was all pretty standard stuff. But then we watched Mom kill the chickens, which involved ceremoniously lowering their heads into metal cones and stamping a blade beneath the chin. More humane this way, Mom had said. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but no one said anything at the time.

“I barely know her,” my sister continued. “I bet her happiest memory is planting a stupid cabbage or something like that. Remember back home when she was too scared to even get a spider out of my bedroom? Dad had to do it.”

“Hey,” I said. “I was the one who got the spiders out.”

“Whatever. We should tell her we’ll pay to get the procedure done for her.”

“Goes without saying.”

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IMOGEN OSBORNE is a British writer living in Ithaca, NY. Her stories and poems can be found in A Public Space, ONLY POEMS, berlin lit, and elsewhere. An excerpt of her novel in progress was the winner of the 2024 Masters Review Novel Excerpt Prize. She holds an MFA from Cornell University.


VOLUME 59 No. 1