The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

by Janelle Monáe

DOC YOUNG HAS HAD A TRAVELING PARTY FOR AS LONG AS SESHET has been alive. Longer, if you believe the legends. They say he used to be a kid leading the protests against New Dawn’s glorious revolution, before the original Alpha America Party established the Standards and memory surveillance regime, which stamped out all “antisocial deviance.” They also say Doc Young’s taken his party on the road around the world, to countries that still haven’t adopted New Dawn’s freely available surveillance technology. The countries, Seshet now remembers, where her mother loved to travel, before she disappeared. Doc Young is bigger than Little Delta, but it’s a part of him; it’s where he’s from, and where he learned to love drugs and music and that crazy, classic life. He’s returned to it again and again over the decades, like a comet around the sun. And like a comet, he disrupts the tides and obscures the stars, he dazzles and he terrifies—and he’s gone before anyone can ask him to clean up the mess.