The Final Cut

It's sometime in the near future. Largely on affordability, one in twenty people have Zoe implants inserted at birth, they manufactured by EYE Tech. The implants record what the host sees over his entire life. It is the job of a cutter to edit the footage post-mortem into a rememory for loved ones, it the official record of only the good, editing out for posterity the bad, the ugly and especially the very ugly. Ethically, cutters cannot combine footage from more than one implant for a rememory, cannot sell footage, and cannot have an implant himself. Alan Hakman is known to be the best cutter in the business in his seeming detachment from his subject matter, especially in needing to view that very ugly without judgment. He is arguably able to do so in being a loner, he having a cordial enough business relationship with fellow cutters, with his current girlfriend, Delila, the only other person in his life with some meaning to him. His work and that of his fellow cutters is getting more dangerous as a very vocal anti-implant movement is emerging in society, protesters picketing at high profile memorials where a rememory is shown. Alan's latest job is the very sensitive one of Charles Bannister, one of the first EYE Tech executives to have his rememory done. Two issues arise in the process of this job. First, Fletcher, an ex-cutter who long ago left the business for unspecified reasons, approaches Alan wanting either to take over the job or purchase the Bannister footage, Alan who believes it is to expose the technology for the ill that it has in society by exposing something related to Bannister himself, Fletcher who will go to extreme measures to get that footage. And second, Alan discovers someone from his far past in Bannister's footage, that very bad in Alan's life which he thought was buried long ago literally never to rise from the grave.—Huggo