Vouch for Me by Greg Egan

Synopsis

Julia and her family are diagnosed with latent HHV-10, a condition with a yearly 10% chance to strike through a violent encephalitis episode, leading to retrograde amnesia. This might seem like a tremendously rare condition, in a world populated by a myriad of other rare ailments, but it isn't so.

This affliction is more and more common, your neighbors, celebrities, simple passerby or even you might have it. In Egan's narrative, the condition is so rampant that the medical field (and the world, really) has adapted to it in a sort of permacrisis state, a problem that can't exactly be fixed, but coped with, worked around.

Funding in search of a cure rivals that of cancer researchers and businesses are profiting from the situation. It's not quite a crisis yet, civilization is not on the brink of extinction, but it's slowly walking toward a foggy future.

Julia works for one such business working on easing the memory recovery of HHV-10 victims, Erebus Security. Her job is concerned with the conception and improvement of life journals, documents which are essentially tied to a specific user and which they can use to log their entire life details. Once HHV-10 hits them (and if they survive), the principle is that they would be the only person able to recover their personal life journal.

Once the amnesiac person recovers their data, they can work on resuming life as it was.

But it's never quite the same when you lose your memory.

Securing the past

Julia's career revolves around data security, ensuring a user's data cannot be compromised and used for wrongdoing. As the world adapted to HHV-10, so did malevolent people.

When HHV-10 activates, the amnesiac person is left in a very precarious and fragile position. They are facing a great fog, sometimes decades of memories plainly wiped away, and are forced to pick up the pieces. Some people might even be tempted to forge a life journal to gain a financial advantage or any kind of edge over their victims.

Once HHV-10 comes for her family, how is Julia meant to be confident that her life journal is truly hers and hasn't been tampered with? Zoe, her daughter, is not too concerned with these worries. In fact, she has a device that she can periodically talk to to log in her memories. All her friends have one of these!

Of course, this worries Julia greatly, despite her husband's (Patrick) attempts to reassure her. Patrick doesn't share Julia's skepticism either. He simply doesn't see why anyone would forge or tamper with his life journal, especially since he sincerely trusts Julia to respect his privacy.

At Julia's job, she's assigned to welcome Sara, a colleague that's recovering from HHV-10. Sara has to learn her entire job again. Well, not quite. Her brain has registered and retained her muscle memories and her skills, she just doesn't remember what she's proficient for. There's a whole decorum around welcoming back someone with HHV-10, such as avoiding to say 'welcome back' and electing to instead say 'welcome', simply.

Fortunately, Julia might have found a way to secure life journals. She might have found a sort of unique individual signature, an identifier that can't be forged or tampered with.

Identity

The passages of Sara's return to office are revealing of what's to come. She's not dumb, she knows she has been struck with HHV-10 and can tell her colleagues are distant and are using caution around her. She confides to Julia that she's not certain she wants to remain at this job and that she feels like she's 'stealing' her past self's body and life.

In the course of the story, Patrick is rushed to the hospital, because his HHV-10 has activated. He will have to cope with the aftermath, and so will Julia. Patrick is much more reserved in how he feels about the whole situation, but he's trusting and makes genuine attempts at understanding his past life.

After a short stay at the hospital under supervision, Patrick comes back home and temporarily occupies a spare bedroom, since he's not quite comfortable sleeping with Julia for the time being. He begins reading his life journal and taking notes. To Julia's surprise, Patrick is not a vegetarian anymore and is seen enjoying meat and a vegetarian pizza equally.

However, as time goes on, and after having slept with Julia to confirm or not his feelings, Patrick is forced to recognize he, well, doesn't recognize Patrick at all. Yes, deep within himself, he trusts Julia and knows that his life journal is genuine, but he simply doesn't relate to Patrick. It's not his identity anymore.

It's like HHV-10 wiped Patrick away and left a stranger instead. A stranger that did try to connect with Patrick with all his heart, but just couldn't. Just like how Sara couldn't relate to her past self, even going as far as revealing she doesn't really care at all about her past history and has no particular feeling about it either.

Whoever Patrick is now, it's not Julia's husband. He asks for a divorce and (thankfully) promises to keep taking care of Zoe, because even if he's a new person he recognizes that he owes it to Patrick to continue honoring his responsibilities. Zoe deserves a present father.

Change

Julia worried about the wrong things all along. While she was going on and on in her head about data security breaches and personal information frauds, she avoided facing the real concern she had all along, deep within her heart: does HHV-10 wipe out more than just memories, but also an entire person's identity? If so, no amount of foolproof high tech security can fix that.

Once HHV-10 hits her, would she even care about what she would read in her journal? And what about Zoe? What's the future like for a family that might not even recognize each other? Can HHV-10 wipe someone twice?

The story opened on a dream Julia had. She was at the airport and just as she was about to cross the gates, she realized she had forgotten her papers back home. Back in the present, at the airport, she indeed forgets her passport and her family presses her to keep going, since they'll vouch for her.

The answer was in that introduction all along: you will recognize yourself through others. That's why Patrick realized he wasn't Patrick anymore, not because he couldn't trust his life journal or Julia, but exactly because he could trust them. Despite them (or because of them), he couldn't recognize himself in Patrick or Patrick's life and had to go.

To conclude

There are several factors leading me to liking this story.

• The protagonist is not working on a cure, but actively working on a workaround: Instead of having the protagonist fix the HHV-10 condition, they try to ease the complications related to memory retrieval. This echoes to the wider world in the narrative that's both funding high tech medical researches, but mostly coping with the issue. Julia, like everyone else in the world, is continuously coping with the condition and its devastating effects. But most of all, the fallout is complicated, embarrassing and nobody feels comfortable facing it.

• The world keeps spinning: It's alluded to that people are generally worried that HHV-10 could tear away entire civilizations. It's a widespread condition, but one the world has evolved with for quite some time. There are even customs to honor when dealing with someone that's recovering from HHV-10. All in all, Earth isn't collapsing on itself and tomorrow remains to be seen. This enables readers to focus on Julia's personal journey.

• It's not a conspiracy to cull the population: There's no allusion to HHV-10 being a virus intended to achieve an evil goal, it's just another condition. A terrible condition, but still, it's not part of a grand scheme that Julia has to somehow overcome. Sometimes life throws you a curveball and you got to pick up the broken mirror pieces.

  
  

I feel these three points are important, because they let the reader focus on the effects of HHV-10 on regular folks. There are several passages exposing how HHV-10 has affected society, but only to highlight how it has practically been normalized and what's expected from individuals recovering from HHV-10.

A touching story that makes you question what makes a person what they are and consider how fragile identity (and belonging) can be.

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You can read more from Greg Egan at https://www.gregegan.net/

'Vouch for Me' was published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact July/August 2024