The escher man, p.4
The Escher Man, page 4
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were going to see someone about it.”
“I was thinking about it, yeah.”
“Last time we were here you said you were going to.”
“Last time?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You fucking drunk. You stop sucking down a quart of whisky over breakfast and you’ll find your memory problems magically disappear.”
“What do you mean last time?”
“Three weeks ago. You don’t remember?”
I shook my head. “This is what I’m talking about.” I emptied my glass, wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, and said: “You ever worry what they do to your memory pin when they take it, Wangaratta?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Of course we think about it,” said Ha. “But we compare our memory timelines sometimes, and they always look fine.”
“Do they?”
She sipped her beer. “Yeah.”
“You ever give them your pin, Ha?”
She frowned at the question. “No. Of course not.”
“Not that you remember.”
“They’d have no reason to ask, and I’d have no reason to say yes.”
“They would if they needed you to provide an alibi for Wangaratta. Ensure you two had synchronised memories, in case the police wanted to look at a particular timestamp. Something like that would sound reasonable. Something maybe you’d say yes to.”
“But they haven’t…” She stopped herself. “I see. Yeah, I see what you mean.”
I said: “I need to go to someone, find out which of my memories have been falsified. Find out about…” My beer was empty. I signalled to the barman; he nodded back.
“About what, Endel?” asked Ha. Something in her eye told me she already knew my answer.
“I want to know what happened with Jian and me. Where it all went wrong.”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I told you last time we sat here: those are bad memories, Endel. You don’t want to go raking them over.”
“I can’t stop. Something—something inevitable is happening in my head.”
“That so?” She leaned back in her seat. “The only inevitability I see is the whisky-fuelled rocket ship of self-destruction you’re riding high into the sky. The inevitability of gravity.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Gravity, and opinions. This one from the puppy juggler lecturing me on lifestyle choices.”
A small smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Yeah. Life’s three great certainties: gravity, opinions, and you stumbling over to our apartment for Sunday lunch, smelling like stale beer and three days’ worth of ball sweat.”
We all laughed at that.
“You sure you’re not Australian?” I asked. “You talk like one.”
“I’m fluent in crude, if that’s what you’re asking.”
We smiled and drank our beers.
As our glasses were slowly drained, and our smiles faded, Ha put her eyes on me and said: “Jian was a friend of mine. I miss her too. But look at the life you lead. You can’t have kids in this world.” She reached over, squeezed Wangaratta’s hand. “David and I have talked about it. If we ever manage to have children.” She lowered her voice. “If we ever have kids we’re going to get out of this place, Endel. This city, it just swallows you up in its black, bottomless maw and nothing remains.”
I’d forgotten David was his real name, so was confused about who she was talking about for a second. But what she said was right, about this town, it rang true.
We exchanged small talk after that, neither of us wanting to revisit old wounds, until Wangaratta and Ha excused themselves for dinner. After they left I drank pints of beer and ate crisp soy chicken wings with a hot sauce dip. The clientele flowed through the place, tourists for the most part, mainland Chinese and the occasional wealthy European. I’d look over the Euros with mild curiosity before returning to my thoughts. They were a dying breed now. Another waking dream in Macau.
I sighed. I had to be sure, about Jian. Had to see the one person utterly verboten to a guy like me.
8
The Omissioner was younger than I expected, maybe thirty-five. Swarthy, southern European perhaps, she wore a sleek blue qipao and her black curly hair down. The name Om. Aletheia Milas glowed in soft green holotype across a black-backed plaque on her brown wood desk. A curved dark-wood ashtray sat in the centre of the table, gleaming in the low light. Real wood, most likely, given her lucrative profession. Large tai screens hung near two of the four walls, their black frames empty.
The walls themselves were full of prints, rows upon rows in black and white. Simple icons: a clenched fist, black on white; large, full lips, white on black; a four-leaf clover with a cross through it; a revolver; the letter S; black Buddha on a white background; white elephant on black; black belly-dancer on white; a playing card, the ace of spades; the circle-and-cross gender symbol for woman; an open palm; a top hat; uppercase letter C with a small c inside; an optical illusion of a man walking up and up an infinite staircase; and on and on and on, filling the walls from floor to ceiling. The only variation to the rows of prints were the tai screens, and behind the Omissioner, a long hologram of a landscape: bucolic, green, a soft wind blowing within the picture, pushing low white clouds across the scene and silently rustling the leaves.
She leaned back in her black ergonomic chair and intertwined her fingers.
I stopped for a moment, considering the woman.
“Expecting someone Chinese?” she asked, apparently knowing my mind.
“I mean…” I said, then shrugged the yeah.
“Greek civilisation is also known for its expertise on memory.”
“It is?”
The woman shook her head to herself, eyes closed momentarily to damp her irritation.
I shook off a feeling of déjà vu and said: “Anyway. Omissioner.”
“Please. Aletheia.”
“I’m Endel. Ebbinghaus.”
She looked at me for a couple of moments, one thick black eyebrow raised in vague amusement at a joke I didn’t get. Then the eyebrow stood at ease and she said, “Endel Ebbinghaus – that’s a Dutch name, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Mexican?”
“Mexican?” I narrowed my eyes. I was definitely missing a joke here.
“German?”
I nodded slowly. “I’m Australian, but yeah, it’s German.”
She indicated the seat opposite her. I took it.
When I began to speak she held up her hand and said: “Let me guess. You’re having recurring dreams, but you’re not sure anymore if they are dreams or memories. You’re starting to worry that perhaps your cochlear implant has downloaded a memory virus. You re-watch episodes from your life to remember your past, but they seem unreal, like you’re watching someone else’s life. Sometimes you find yourself in bars or restaurants, and you don’t know how you got there; or standing on the street, confused, unsure of what day it is or where you are going. Everything feels like déjà vu, like you did the exact same thing an hour, or day, or month before.” She tilted her head. “You’ve got a green glass vial in your jacket pocket. In the vial is a liquid you’ve been dripping into your alcohol. You do this regularly, at the behest of your employer who you refuse to name, in a job you refuse to talk about.” She raised her eyebrow at me. “Right?”
I shifted in my seat. “What the fuck?”
“You told me, Endel.”
I shifted again, jaw tightening. “Bullshit. What is going on here?”
The Omissioner reached into her desk drawer, pulling out an elegant jade cigarette case. She popped it open, slid out a slender white cigarette and glanced up at me. “I’m not a mind reader, Mister Ebbinghaus. I simply have a good memory.” She lit her cigarette with a lighter that matched the case and inhaled, closing her eyes for a moment. She blew the smoke out through her nose, slowly, and repeated: “Just a good memory. But the way the world is now, a good memory can be mistaken for magic.”
Her smoking made me want to, so I lit a Double Happiness. The tension abated in my jaw as I took a deep drag. “I’m going to need something more concrete than your word, Omissioner.”
“And you’ll get something far better than my word, but first I’m going to have to ask for your memory pin,” she said, and held out her hand.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll want me to analyse it.”
I paused, then said: “Bullshit. If I’ve been here before, as you say, then you’ve already run a scan.”
She tapped her lighter on the table, looking me over. “You’re right. Nonetheless, I need you to give it to me as a precaution. I’m just going to leave it here, in plain sight. I think you understand why.”
Yeah, I understood. I pressed my finger to the cool steel of my implant, and mumbled the command phrase. The head of the pin popped out a few millimetres; I extracted it with my fingernails.
Aletheia indicated the tai screen to my right with her eyes. “Now watch,” she said, then spoke towards the screen: “Give me a visual of my last meeting with Endel Ebbinghaus. Play from the beginning.”
The empty space between the frame flickered gold for a moment, then a three-dimensional image resolved itself, shot from a high angle in the Omissioner’s office. I watched myself enter the room:
The Omissioner leaned back in a black ergonomic chair, her fingers intertwined. The angle of the nanocam emphasised the curve of her breast under the green silk qipao.
I watched myself say: “Omissioner?”
She nodded. “Yes. Call me Aletheia.”
“I’m Endel. Ebbinghaus.”
She raised a single thick black eyebrow and said: “Endel Ebbinghaus – that’s a Dutch name, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Mexican?”
“Mexican?” My eyes narrowed. “No.”
She smiled. “I’m kidding. It’s German, of course.”
I nodded slowly. “Yes, it’s German.”
She indicated the seat opposite her. I took it.
“Stop.” The image froze and Aletheia looked at me. “Look familiar?”
“That’s a recording of the conversation we just had. I don’t understand.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Look again, at what I am wearing.”
Her elegant, neck-to-calf qipao was blue silk with silver trim, shimmering in the low light. I glanced back at the image, now frozen and hovering. In there, her dress was green. “Some kind of trick,” I said.
“This is a recording from three weeks ago. You came in here, Mister Ebbinghaus, and you did tell me everything.”
I blew a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke. Something in the ceiling was noiselessly sucking the idle serpents of smoke from the room, keeping the air clear and fresh. “Everything?”
“Well, not everything. But I ran a diagnostic of the memory pin scan I made when you were here last, as you paid me to do. It showed me glimpses of a number of rather unsavoury incidents that may or may not have been real. You told me some of the rest. You had to, in order to give me some identification tags for my search of your memory line.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Legally, our session is confidential.” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled a languorous cloud of smoke, and said: “But of course, you’re not one to concern yourself with legalities. I can bring up the recording of our conversation now, if you want, for you to verify.”
“No.” I shook my head. A new tension rose in the back of my mind. This woman was a problem. She’d been into my head, now maybe I was going to let her in twice. A lot of things in there shouldn’t be seeing the light of day. “No. Tell me again. I want to know what is happening to me. I need to know what is real.”
9
Omissioner Aletheia Milas sighed. “I spend a lot of time repeating myself in this job.”
“And I spend a lot of time breaking people’s kneecaps. Every occupation has its unpleasant necessities.”
She looked me over at that, trying to maintain her professional patina. She’d fooled me at first, but now I could see her fear: the stiffness across her shoulders, the way she blinked too often, like some instinctual trigger in her mind was trying to unsee the situation I’d placed her in.
Aletheia smoothed the dress over her legs with one hand, shifting in her seat. “The facts of life: organic memory has declined precipitously for ninety per cent of the population. Natural memory is now merely a few scattered remnants, mainly what we call reminiscence bumps from youth or childhood – seminal experiences we tend to remember, no matter how weak the memory function. However, in general, the natural formation of long-term memory is slowly becoming extinct.” She pointed her cigarette at me. “I take it you’ve heard the theories as to why?”
“I read somewhere it was genetic engineering polluting the food chain.”
“That’s the dumbest of them, but yes, it’s one.” My jaw clenched. She continued: “Another is that a virus has spread through the nanotech contained in our cochlear implants and optic nerves, one of the consequences of which is an impairment of our memory function. That one’s quite popular, but wrong.
“In my opinion, the right one is this: freewave addiction has altered our brains. The human brain is a powerful, yet malleable creation. Our neural pathways are infinitely adaptable; they change as the world around us changes: in response to trauma, language, environment, and when we introduce new technologies to everyday life.
“The biggest technological revolution in the last thirty years was the cochlear-glyph implant. It gives us the freewave, sent right into our skulls, every waking minute of the day. Ironically, this has huge implications for the part of our mind that hasn’t really changed in millennia: our Neanderthal brain. This old part of our brain is geared, as a basic survival instinct, to hunt for new information. Where once it hunted for food, looked for shelter, or changes in the weather, now it hunts on the freewave. It gives us – the user – a dopamine hit with each new snippet of useless information, with each new connection on social media, with each alert coming through our on-retina displays. Nearly the entire population are, literally, drug addicts, albeit to a natural drug.
“This has rewired our neural pathways. We need ten minutes to encode memories. Just ten minutes, bouncing around somewhere at the edge of our conscious mind, until they are stored. The problem is that the human brain can’t hold a single thought for ten minutes anymore, we can barely hold them for one. So the collapse in memory occurs at the most basic level: encoding. We have poor memories, not because we have trouble storing or retrieving our experiences, but because they were never absorbed into memory in the first place.”
I’d let her speak it out, but she hadn’t come to any particular point I could see. “I don’t care about any of this. Memory pins have solved all these problems.”
“Ah yes. The memory pin,” she said, shaking her head. She stubbed out her cigarette butt, then lit another, her gaze pausing for a moment on the frozen picture of us up on the tai screen. “Most see the memory pins as our salvation. The artificial recording and replication that gives each and every one of us photographic recall. I see it differently.” She picked up my pin from the table. “This is the final nail in memory’s coffin. Memory pins ensure that the areas of the brain needed to form memories are no longer needed. Unused, they atrophy. The historical decline in memory, whatever the cause, was gradual. Decade after decade the slope of recall and attention fell ever so gently downwards. Then the memory pins were introduced, and it dropped precipitously.”
“You still haven’t made your point, Omissioner.”
“Yes, you said that last time.”
“I was right then, as well.”
She turned my pin in the light. “The point is this: anyone who gets hold of this can do whatever they want with your mind. They can implant any memory they like.”
I feigned nonchalance with a shrug. “It’s part of the job.”
“Idiot.” She hissed through her teeth. “This isn’t just a piece of technology, a feed recording to manipulate so you can fool the police when they subpoena it.” She tapped on the spot behind her ear, at the empty space where her cochlear implant should be. I was surprised – it had been a long time since I’d met someone unplugged. She continued: “This is your soul. This is everything you are, your experience of the world, your fears and phobias, your friendships and failings, your mistakes and triumphs. Everyone you’ve ever loved, everything you’ve ever cared about, every fibre of your character is memory. This is the sum total of your being, everything, save the thin edge of the present.”
Her fear was now gone, replaced with clear distaste. “And people like you just give it away.”
I was silent, letting the information settle. She was right and I knew she was. Every time I handed over the pin, I knew it. But deep down the alcoholic knows the booze is killing them, as well. They’re just too cowardly to finish it quick. I handed over that pin because I yearned for that erasure, to hide my dark heart, even from myself.
I said: “The pin only stores three years at a time. So at least I know that if I do manage to remember something from before then, that it will be real?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Normally false memories and memory wipes are reserved for trauma victims, as a way to help them get on with their lives. Done this way, all the alterations to memory are legal, transparent and on record. But I’ve dealt with men and women in your profession before, and for you it isn’t so simple. When they give you a false memory, first you watch it late at night, right?”
I nodded.
“They do this so you understand the shape of your new memory. Then it is programmed to encode during REM sleep, by inserting certain images and phrases when you dream. It’s more effective this way, because today the sleeping mind has a longer attention span than the waking. So if they do this, Mister Ebbinghaus, who is to say they don’t insert episodes into your dreams from when you were a child or a young man? Trojan memories slipped in elsewhere on the pin?”
“I thought you were going to see someone about it.”
“I was thinking about it, yeah.”
“Last time we were here you said you were going to.”
“Last time?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You fucking drunk. You stop sucking down a quart of whisky over breakfast and you’ll find your memory problems magically disappear.”
“What do you mean last time?”
“Three weeks ago. You don’t remember?”
I shook my head. “This is what I’m talking about.” I emptied my glass, wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, and said: “You ever worry what they do to your memory pin when they take it, Wangaratta?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Of course we think about it,” said Ha. “But we compare our memory timelines sometimes, and they always look fine.”
“Do they?”
She sipped her beer. “Yeah.”
“You ever give them your pin, Ha?”
She frowned at the question. “No. Of course not.”
“Not that you remember.”
“They’d have no reason to ask, and I’d have no reason to say yes.”
“They would if they needed you to provide an alibi for Wangaratta. Ensure you two had synchronised memories, in case the police wanted to look at a particular timestamp. Something like that would sound reasonable. Something maybe you’d say yes to.”
“But they haven’t…” She stopped herself. “I see. Yeah, I see what you mean.”
I said: “I need to go to someone, find out which of my memories have been falsified. Find out about…” My beer was empty. I signalled to the barman; he nodded back.
“About what, Endel?” asked Ha. Something in her eye told me she already knew my answer.
“I want to know what happened with Jian and me. Where it all went wrong.”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I told you last time we sat here: those are bad memories, Endel. You don’t want to go raking them over.”
“I can’t stop. Something—something inevitable is happening in my head.”
“That so?” She leaned back in her seat. “The only inevitability I see is the whisky-fuelled rocket ship of self-destruction you’re riding high into the sky. The inevitability of gravity.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Gravity, and opinions. This one from the puppy juggler lecturing me on lifestyle choices.”
A small smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Yeah. Life’s three great certainties: gravity, opinions, and you stumbling over to our apartment for Sunday lunch, smelling like stale beer and three days’ worth of ball sweat.”
We all laughed at that.
“You sure you’re not Australian?” I asked. “You talk like one.”
“I’m fluent in crude, if that’s what you’re asking.”
We smiled and drank our beers.
As our glasses were slowly drained, and our smiles faded, Ha put her eyes on me and said: “Jian was a friend of mine. I miss her too. But look at the life you lead. You can’t have kids in this world.” She reached over, squeezed Wangaratta’s hand. “David and I have talked about it. If we ever manage to have children.” She lowered her voice. “If we ever have kids we’re going to get out of this place, Endel. This city, it just swallows you up in its black, bottomless maw and nothing remains.”
I’d forgotten David was his real name, so was confused about who she was talking about for a second. But what she said was right, about this town, it rang true.
We exchanged small talk after that, neither of us wanting to revisit old wounds, until Wangaratta and Ha excused themselves for dinner. After they left I drank pints of beer and ate crisp soy chicken wings with a hot sauce dip. The clientele flowed through the place, tourists for the most part, mainland Chinese and the occasional wealthy European. I’d look over the Euros with mild curiosity before returning to my thoughts. They were a dying breed now. Another waking dream in Macau.
I sighed. I had to be sure, about Jian. Had to see the one person utterly verboten to a guy like me.
8
The Omissioner was younger than I expected, maybe thirty-five. Swarthy, southern European perhaps, she wore a sleek blue qipao and her black curly hair down. The name Om. Aletheia Milas glowed in soft green holotype across a black-backed plaque on her brown wood desk. A curved dark-wood ashtray sat in the centre of the table, gleaming in the low light. Real wood, most likely, given her lucrative profession. Large tai screens hung near two of the four walls, their black frames empty.
The walls themselves were full of prints, rows upon rows in black and white. Simple icons: a clenched fist, black on white; large, full lips, white on black; a four-leaf clover with a cross through it; a revolver; the letter S; black Buddha on a white background; white elephant on black; black belly-dancer on white; a playing card, the ace of spades; the circle-and-cross gender symbol for woman; an open palm; a top hat; uppercase letter C with a small c inside; an optical illusion of a man walking up and up an infinite staircase; and on and on and on, filling the walls from floor to ceiling. The only variation to the rows of prints were the tai screens, and behind the Omissioner, a long hologram of a landscape: bucolic, green, a soft wind blowing within the picture, pushing low white clouds across the scene and silently rustling the leaves.
She leaned back in her black ergonomic chair and intertwined her fingers.
I stopped for a moment, considering the woman.
“Expecting someone Chinese?” she asked, apparently knowing my mind.
“I mean…” I said, then shrugged the yeah.
“Greek civilisation is also known for its expertise on memory.”
“It is?”
The woman shook her head to herself, eyes closed momentarily to damp her irritation.
I shook off a feeling of déjà vu and said: “Anyway. Omissioner.”
“Please. Aletheia.”
“I’m Endel. Ebbinghaus.”
She looked at me for a couple of moments, one thick black eyebrow raised in vague amusement at a joke I didn’t get. Then the eyebrow stood at ease and she said, “Endel Ebbinghaus – that’s a Dutch name, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Mexican?”
“Mexican?” I narrowed my eyes. I was definitely missing a joke here.
“German?”
I nodded slowly. “I’m Australian, but yeah, it’s German.”
She indicated the seat opposite her. I took it.
When I began to speak she held up her hand and said: “Let me guess. You’re having recurring dreams, but you’re not sure anymore if they are dreams or memories. You’re starting to worry that perhaps your cochlear implant has downloaded a memory virus. You re-watch episodes from your life to remember your past, but they seem unreal, like you’re watching someone else’s life. Sometimes you find yourself in bars or restaurants, and you don’t know how you got there; or standing on the street, confused, unsure of what day it is or where you are going. Everything feels like déjà vu, like you did the exact same thing an hour, or day, or month before.” She tilted her head. “You’ve got a green glass vial in your jacket pocket. In the vial is a liquid you’ve been dripping into your alcohol. You do this regularly, at the behest of your employer who you refuse to name, in a job you refuse to talk about.” She raised her eyebrow at me. “Right?”
I shifted in my seat. “What the fuck?”
“You told me, Endel.”
I shifted again, jaw tightening. “Bullshit. What is going on here?”
The Omissioner reached into her desk drawer, pulling out an elegant jade cigarette case. She popped it open, slid out a slender white cigarette and glanced up at me. “I’m not a mind reader, Mister Ebbinghaus. I simply have a good memory.” She lit her cigarette with a lighter that matched the case and inhaled, closing her eyes for a moment. She blew the smoke out through her nose, slowly, and repeated: “Just a good memory. But the way the world is now, a good memory can be mistaken for magic.”
Her smoking made me want to, so I lit a Double Happiness. The tension abated in my jaw as I took a deep drag. “I’m going to need something more concrete than your word, Omissioner.”
“And you’ll get something far better than my word, but first I’m going to have to ask for your memory pin,” she said, and held out her hand.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll want me to analyse it.”
I paused, then said: “Bullshit. If I’ve been here before, as you say, then you’ve already run a scan.”
She tapped her lighter on the table, looking me over. “You’re right. Nonetheless, I need you to give it to me as a precaution. I’m just going to leave it here, in plain sight. I think you understand why.”
Yeah, I understood. I pressed my finger to the cool steel of my implant, and mumbled the command phrase. The head of the pin popped out a few millimetres; I extracted it with my fingernails.
Aletheia indicated the tai screen to my right with her eyes. “Now watch,” she said, then spoke towards the screen: “Give me a visual of my last meeting with Endel Ebbinghaus. Play from the beginning.”
The empty space between the frame flickered gold for a moment, then a three-dimensional image resolved itself, shot from a high angle in the Omissioner’s office. I watched myself enter the room:
The Omissioner leaned back in a black ergonomic chair, her fingers intertwined. The angle of the nanocam emphasised the curve of her breast under the green silk qipao.
I watched myself say: “Omissioner?”
She nodded. “Yes. Call me Aletheia.”
“I’m Endel. Ebbinghaus.”
She raised a single thick black eyebrow and said: “Endel Ebbinghaus – that’s a Dutch name, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Mexican?”
“Mexican?” My eyes narrowed. “No.”
She smiled. “I’m kidding. It’s German, of course.”
I nodded slowly. “Yes, it’s German.”
She indicated the seat opposite her. I took it.
“Stop.” The image froze and Aletheia looked at me. “Look familiar?”
“That’s a recording of the conversation we just had. I don’t understand.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Look again, at what I am wearing.”
Her elegant, neck-to-calf qipao was blue silk with silver trim, shimmering in the low light. I glanced back at the image, now frozen and hovering. In there, her dress was green. “Some kind of trick,” I said.
“This is a recording from three weeks ago. You came in here, Mister Ebbinghaus, and you did tell me everything.”
I blew a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke. Something in the ceiling was noiselessly sucking the idle serpents of smoke from the room, keeping the air clear and fresh. “Everything?”
“Well, not everything. But I ran a diagnostic of the memory pin scan I made when you were here last, as you paid me to do. It showed me glimpses of a number of rather unsavoury incidents that may or may not have been real. You told me some of the rest. You had to, in order to give me some identification tags for my search of your memory line.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Legally, our session is confidential.” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled a languorous cloud of smoke, and said: “But of course, you’re not one to concern yourself with legalities. I can bring up the recording of our conversation now, if you want, for you to verify.”
“No.” I shook my head. A new tension rose in the back of my mind. This woman was a problem. She’d been into my head, now maybe I was going to let her in twice. A lot of things in there shouldn’t be seeing the light of day. “No. Tell me again. I want to know what is happening to me. I need to know what is real.”
9
Omissioner Aletheia Milas sighed. “I spend a lot of time repeating myself in this job.”
“And I spend a lot of time breaking people’s kneecaps. Every occupation has its unpleasant necessities.”
She looked me over at that, trying to maintain her professional patina. She’d fooled me at first, but now I could see her fear: the stiffness across her shoulders, the way she blinked too often, like some instinctual trigger in her mind was trying to unsee the situation I’d placed her in.
Aletheia smoothed the dress over her legs with one hand, shifting in her seat. “The facts of life: organic memory has declined precipitously for ninety per cent of the population. Natural memory is now merely a few scattered remnants, mainly what we call reminiscence bumps from youth or childhood – seminal experiences we tend to remember, no matter how weak the memory function. However, in general, the natural formation of long-term memory is slowly becoming extinct.” She pointed her cigarette at me. “I take it you’ve heard the theories as to why?”
“I read somewhere it was genetic engineering polluting the food chain.”
“That’s the dumbest of them, but yes, it’s one.” My jaw clenched. She continued: “Another is that a virus has spread through the nanotech contained in our cochlear implants and optic nerves, one of the consequences of which is an impairment of our memory function. That one’s quite popular, but wrong.
“In my opinion, the right one is this: freewave addiction has altered our brains. The human brain is a powerful, yet malleable creation. Our neural pathways are infinitely adaptable; they change as the world around us changes: in response to trauma, language, environment, and when we introduce new technologies to everyday life.
“The biggest technological revolution in the last thirty years was the cochlear-glyph implant. It gives us the freewave, sent right into our skulls, every waking minute of the day. Ironically, this has huge implications for the part of our mind that hasn’t really changed in millennia: our Neanderthal brain. This old part of our brain is geared, as a basic survival instinct, to hunt for new information. Where once it hunted for food, looked for shelter, or changes in the weather, now it hunts on the freewave. It gives us – the user – a dopamine hit with each new snippet of useless information, with each new connection on social media, with each alert coming through our on-retina displays. Nearly the entire population are, literally, drug addicts, albeit to a natural drug.
“This has rewired our neural pathways. We need ten minutes to encode memories. Just ten minutes, bouncing around somewhere at the edge of our conscious mind, until they are stored. The problem is that the human brain can’t hold a single thought for ten minutes anymore, we can barely hold them for one. So the collapse in memory occurs at the most basic level: encoding. We have poor memories, not because we have trouble storing or retrieving our experiences, but because they were never absorbed into memory in the first place.”
I’d let her speak it out, but she hadn’t come to any particular point I could see. “I don’t care about any of this. Memory pins have solved all these problems.”
“Ah yes. The memory pin,” she said, shaking her head. She stubbed out her cigarette butt, then lit another, her gaze pausing for a moment on the frozen picture of us up on the tai screen. “Most see the memory pins as our salvation. The artificial recording and replication that gives each and every one of us photographic recall. I see it differently.” She picked up my pin from the table. “This is the final nail in memory’s coffin. Memory pins ensure that the areas of the brain needed to form memories are no longer needed. Unused, they atrophy. The historical decline in memory, whatever the cause, was gradual. Decade after decade the slope of recall and attention fell ever so gently downwards. Then the memory pins were introduced, and it dropped precipitously.”
“You still haven’t made your point, Omissioner.”
“Yes, you said that last time.”
“I was right then, as well.”
She turned my pin in the light. “The point is this: anyone who gets hold of this can do whatever they want with your mind. They can implant any memory they like.”
I feigned nonchalance with a shrug. “It’s part of the job.”
“Idiot.” She hissed through her teeth. “This isn’t just a piece of technology, a feed recording to manipulate so you can fool the police when they subpoena it.” She tapped on the spot behind her ear, at the empty space where her cochlear implant should be. I was surprised – it had been a long time since I’d met someone unplugged. She continued: “This is your soul. This is everything you are, your experience of the world, your fears and phobias, your friendships and failings, your mistakes and triumphs. Everyone you’ve ever loved, everything you’ve ever cared about, every fibre of your character is memory. This is the sum total of your being, everything, save the thin edge of the present.”
Her fear was now gone, replaced with clear distaste. “And people like you just give it away.”
I was silent, letting the information settle. She was right and I knew she was. Every time I handed over the pin, I knew it. But deep down the alcoholic knows the booze is killing them, as well. They’re just too cowardly to finish it quick. I handed over that pin because I yearned for that erasure, to hide my dark heart, even from myself.
I said: “The pin only stores three years at a time. So at least I know that if I do manage to remember something from before then, that it will be real?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Normally false memories and memory wipes are reserved for trauma victims, as a way to help them get on with their lives. Done this way, all the alterations to memory are legal, transparent and on record. But I’ve dealt with men and women in your profession before, and for you it isn’t so simple. When they give you a false memory, first you watch it late at night, right?”
I nodded.
“They do this so you understand the shape of your new memory. Then it is programmed to encode during REM sleep, by inserting certain images and phrases when you dream. It’s more effective this way, because today the sleeping mind has a longer attention span than the waking. So if they do this, Mister Ebbinghaus, who is to say they don’t insert episodes into your dreams from when you were a child or a young man? Trojan memories slipped in elsewhere on the pin?”
