by Jerry
“I just wanted to know my name,” mumbles the grey-suited man.
The man with the bat shrugs again. “What difference does it make?”
“Makes a lot of difference if I expect to get home tonight.” He looks at his business suit. “—Or to work in the morning.”
“See,” the man with the bat says, coming closer, “that’s the problem. This, my friend, is the next stage of evolution. We’ve lived our lives letting what we know define our existence. Our science, our technology, our culture, ethics, and religion, they decide who and what we are.” He’s on a roll now, rising on the tips of his toes and gesturing with the bat, an evangelist ball player at pulpit. “You were the man your parents created, the environmentally programmed product of this city’s cycle of cause and effect, a child of the past. In any given situation, your response was predetermined by who and what you were. Free will was dead, my friend.
“But this . . . this is the dawn of a new age. It’s time to become that which we forget. It’s time for tomorrow to decide what we are today.”
There are suddenly lights in the forest and people shouting. “Prophet, you son of a bitch,” someone yells, “where are you?”
“Uh-oh. Time to be going.” He snags the sleeve of the grey suit. “You’d better come along. They’ll think you were with me.”
“But I don’t even know who you are.”
Switching the bat to his left hand, he thrusts out his right. “Jeremiah Prophet at your service. And you are?”
“Uh . . . that’s the problem.”
“I see.” The shouts and the lights are much closer now. “We’ll sort that out later; right now I think we’d better run.”
“Run?”
“Run!”
What we should have been looking at was the complement system, a particularly lethal group of about 25 proteins in the immune system that destroy disease-causing micro-organisms. We knew as early as 1992 that brain cells taken from people with Alzheimer’s disease appear to manufacture certain complement proteins. We should have seen that these proteins were being unleashed not on a microbe, but on the brain itself. If we’d thought to look, we might have seen the virus programming the rampant proteins.
Under magnification, brain tissue from an Alzheimer’s victim shows abnormal, yarn-like deposits, called neurofibrillary tangles, and the gray matter of the brain will appear pocked with “plaques.” These plaques are made of dying nerve cell components surrounding a core of beta amyloid protein, a fibrous material. Both the tangles and the plaques occur in the areas of the brain involved in memory and intellectual functioning. We discovered complement proteins buried within the telltale plaque and neurofibrillary tangles. Many in the scientific community scoffed at these findings, believing that when the patients died, complement proteins floating in the bloodstream managed to slip past a damaged or leaky blood-brain barrier. Had we done enough research, we’d have seen that the beta amyloid protein itself binds with complement proteins and sets off a toxic cascade in the brain.
If we’d known what we were looking at, we’d have seen the culprit disguising itself as an amyloid protein, deliberately—so it seemed—hiding from our electron microscopes and necropsies. A virus is nothing more than a small capsule of membranes and proteins with one or more strands of DNA or RNA. With so little as its makeup, it’s pretty easy for one to camouflage itself as a beta amyloid. By the time we knew enough to look for CDS, it was already a master of disguises.
—Emery, Peter D., “One Who Remembers,” Epidemiology Monthly, Sept. 2005 (undistributed).
On the far side of a great open field, they come upon a body of water considerably smaller than the reservoir. Both men collapse on the grassy bank, gasping for air. The man in the grey suit rubs a bruised shin. In his flight across the field, he tripped over a man sleeping in a cardboard box.
“Turtle Pond,” says Prophet, nodding toward the water gleaming in the moonlight. He scoops up a double handful of water and splashes it in his face.
“I don’t see any turtles.”
“You’re not likely to, either. Every pond in the park is manmade. Even the reservoir has an artificial bottom. Turtles like good old mud between their toes.” Prophet gets to his feet and stands on wobbly legs. “Whew! Not used to so much exercise.” He squints out across the dark field. “Looks like we lost them though.”
“Who were they?”
“That’d be my good friend Orin and whatever rabble he’s recruited for the evening.”
“What do they want from you?”
“Only my head,” Prophet chuckles. He takes a couple practice swings with the bat. “Well, I’ve got work to do. You have a pleasant evening now.”
“Wait. Aren’t you going to help me?”
“Help you with what?”
“I don’t even know my own name.”
“Hmmm.” Prophet leans on the bat and rubs his chin. “Bob. Let’s call you Bob.”
“But what if that’s not my name?”
“Do you know it’s not your name?”
“Well,” the man in the grey suit replies, considering, “I suppose I could be a Bob. But then again, I could be a . . . well, a someone else.”
Prophet hoists the bat up on his shoulder and starts off to the east. “Nope,” he calls back over his shoulder. “You’re a Bob. You’re Bob McGiveny. You sell insurance on Broadway. Business hasn’t been going too well since the plague wiped out everyone’s memory. Nobody seems worried about having insurance these days. And those who already have insurance don’t ever remember to send in their premium payments.” He’s a good thirty yards away now and getting harder to hear. “You got thrown out of your apartment complex this morning ‘cause you can’t pay the rent, so you came into the park looking for a place to sleep . . . I’d find a place further south if I was you, Bob, down by one of those statues on the Literary Walk maybe . . . maybe even down by the Zoo . . .”
The darkness swallows him and the man in the grey suit is left staring at the moon on the water.
“Bob?” he wonders aloud. He tries to recall what he knows about insurance, but nothing comes to mind. Finally, he follows the bank of the pond, heading west because Prophet went east. A few minutes later he comes upon an empty theater, its stage framed by majestic maples and elms. Beyond the theater is a garden and beyond that a cottage fronted with park benches. The cottage features a dormer-like structure where one would expect the front door to be. Upon closer inspection, the dormer proves to be a small stage. The stage is obviously designed for very small actors . . . or puppets. Bob—for such he has decided to call himself—sits down on one of the benches to take stock of his situation.
It certainly looks like a Puppet House.
“Hello?” he calls.
Hands suddenly seize his arms and pin him to the bench. Flashlights probe his eyes and faces press close. “Where is he?” someone demands.
“Who?” Bob asks.
“Prophet. Which way did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying!”
“I forget.”
“You’re lying. It was only a couple minutes ago.” The speaker pulls Bob to a sitting position. “Who are you?”
“Bob McGiveny. I . . . I sell insurance. You’re Orin?”
The man turns and yells at someone in the darkness. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going? Get back here!” He turns back to Bob. “Dullards! Every so often they forget they’re with me and start wandering off.” He pokes Bob in the chest with a metal pipe. “You’re not that bad off though, Bob. I can tell. You remember which direction Prophet took. You can tell me—or I can rearrange your face with this pipe.”
“I just wanted to get to the Puppet House,” Bob stutters. He shows Orin the slip of paper.
“Heckscher’s is to the south, Bob. This is the Swedish Marionette Theater.” He smacks Bob sharply on the cheek with the pipe. “Which way did he go?”
“Aiyee!” comes a banshee scream from t
he darkness, and suddenly Prophet is among them, cracking heads with his bat. Orin’s recruits flee before the maniacal onslaught.
“Ha!” Prophet laughs, chasing after them, “you’ve forgotten how to fight, haven’t ya?”
“Let them go!” Orin yells. “There’s no need to hurt any of them!”
Prophet comes back into the light of the Marionette Theater marquee. “That includes him,” he replies, motioning to Bob.
“Hell,” Orin mutters, turning Bob loose, “I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“Fine time to tell me that now,” Bob grumbles, “after you’ve scared the life out of me.”
“No big deal,” Orin replies, “You’ll have forgotten all about it by morning.”
The scientists originally called it Cognitive Deficit Syndrome, or CDS, but it’s been a full year since I spoke with anyone else who remembers this. I prefer to tell people that CDS stands for “Citizens for a Demented Society.” I tell them it was an NRA plot to overthrow Uncle Sam before he managed to take away all their handguns. Most people become indignant and storm off with good intentions. Shortly thereafter, they forget what they were mad about.
Dementia refers to a group of symptoms, such as forgetfulness and confusion, that are often associated with old age. But the loss of mental agility is not a normal consequence of aging, but rather the result of a disease process such as a stroke, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, or Parkinson’s.
Our dementia was born in war. Our brains have been the battlefield. Our enemy was not human.
Our enemy was infiltrating as far back as 1907 when the German physician Alois Alzheimer found microscopic bits of debris—since dubbed plaques and neurofibrillary tangles—cluttering brain tissue taken from a 51-year-old woman who had suffered from senile dementia.
Like HIV before it, the CDS virus was devious. It spent years probing, evolving, finding its niche. Far more intelligent than HIV, this enemy knew to leave little or no trace of its occupation. In the years that we sought it out, we chased ghost symptoms, diversely misleading side effects, and phantom transmission modes. We still do not know how CDS spreads. Without our most brilliant medical researchers, we will likely never know. Though few spoke of it, even in the early days of the full onslaught of the virus, I believe this was CDS’s intent. What better way to ensure its survival, than to erase the mental capacity to drive it from the ranks of the human race?
Unlike killer viruses such as HIV, Marburg, Ebola, and all the others, CDS had in mind its own survival when it linked up with the human species. There’d be no fever, no hemorrhaging, no weakening of the immune system. There’d be only quiet acceptance and erasure of the memory of any other way of life.
—Jahrling, Thomas J., Let Me Explain, self-published, 2008.
“Now I’m all turned around,” Bob complains. “If one of you could maybe point me in the right direction, I’ll be going.” Prophet and Orin ignore him, circling each other warily, pipe and baseball bat ready.
“You’ve got to stop destroying the aids we put in place to help these people, Jeremiah.”
“They’re not aids, they’re hindrances! And people like you are only interested in taking advantage of these people.”
“Not true! Without us and without the computer aids, these people are lost.”
“Looks like you recruited your posse tonight just fine without them. What’d you tell them this time, that I was a child molester?”
“I told them you wanted to steal their future.”
“Their future isn’t in those damn electronic boxes, Orin. This is their future. Those who aren’t capable of adjusting to a life where every day is their birthday will be weeded out of society—that’s the basic mechanism for evolution, you idiot! This is nature’s way.”
“This has nothing to do with evolution,” Orin counters, “it’s a goddamn viral plague!”
“Live for today,” Prophet chants, “yesterday is gone forever!”
“Without yesterday, you fool, there can be no tomorrow.”
They proceed to call each other names and take tentative swings with their respective weapons, dubious gladiators in the moonlight.
“Could one of you point me in the right direction?” Bob asks again.
“Wait,” Orin says, backing out of reach of the bat, “we’ll let Bob decide who’s right.”
“Bob doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the wall.”
“Exactly my point!” Orin exclaims. “Without a pocket diary or a friendly ID panel to access, he’s lost. He can’t function in society without some concept of who and what he is.”
“He can’t function in today’s society,” Prophet retaliates, “but he’ll be right at home in tomorrow’s.”
“Provided he can find his home!”
“Every home will be his in the society of tomorrow. We’re talking about a level of social conscious and interaction akin to a hive species where there’s no need for prescribed roles, occupations, or stations. Everyone simply goes out and does what needs to be done. No one tells each ant which grain of sand to move. No one tells a bee which flowers to gather pollen from on any given day. They simply do these things because they must be done.”
“All for one and one for all,” Bob pipes up, having no idea where he’s picked up such an expression. He thinks that he’s just then made it up, and beams rather proudly at the play on words.
“Right!” Prophet exclaims magnanimously. “Bob’s catching on. It’s the good for the greater whole concept.”
“But someone has to build the hive,” Orin protests. “Our education and skills—skills that we acquire through repeated practice—make us capable of building and maintaining our culture. Without higher learning, we lose our science, our math, all the things that have put the stars within our reach. Without these things, the universe and its secrets are forever lost.”
“Your electronic diaries won’t give them back their calculus and quantum physics, Orin.”
“No. But they can help hold society in place until those of us who aren’t affected by CDS can figure out something better. Maybe someone, somewhere, is working on a cure right now.”
“Fat chance.”
“Hey!” Bob cries. “I get it. You guys are normal. Neither of you have this virus thing!”
“Brilliant, Bob,” Orin acknowledges sarcastically. “Absolutely brilliant.”
Prophet shakes his bat at him. “Lay off my good friend Bob there, Orin.”
“I know it’s not his fault,” Orin mumbles apologetically. “Our experiences and our social molding make us who we are. Without individualism, there can be no creativity. No art. No literature. No architecture, music, no original thought. Hell, if we lack the mental faculty to read, or even just to retain what we read, not only have we lost the ability to create new works, but we can’t hold in our minds the great works of the past. Without these things we can’t grow—or maybe even survive—as a species.”
“Our creativity gave us some pretty horrible things too: war, hate and violence, religion, neckties and PeeWee Herman. I certainly won’t be missing any of those!”
Orin ignores him. “Without individualism and creativity, we become a race of mindless automatons stumbling through uneventful days, each one just like the last.”
“Bullshit!” Prophet roars. “Are you listening to this crap, Bob? You’re not mindless, are you? Hell, no! No one’s mindless just because they can’t remember what they did yesterday. And their days aren’t uneventful. On the contrary, they’re guaranteed that every day is fresh and new. It’s like living your entire life as a child.”
“And we all know how cruel children can be.”
“Oh, that’s really trite, Orin. It’s wanting all the things we can’t afford that leads us to do cruel and terrible things to one another. CDS will lead to a social construct in which everything is community property. No man shall covet another man’s home because it could just as easily be his home. If not today, then tomorrow. No man shall covet another ma
n’s wife—if two people want to spend time together, they will. And if they’re always together, if this is the ten thousandth time they’ve made love, it will seem just like the first time. Say goodbye to boredom, Bob. Your culture won’t have it. We’re sitting on the dawn of a golden age of discovery here. Every day, every moment will be new and exciting. I can’t believe you don’t see that, Orin.
“Don’t you agree, Bob?”
When there’s no answer, both men turn to look. Bob is gone.
Those of us who did not immediately contract the disease—or for some unknown reason are immune—were left with a nearly impossible undertaking. The responsibility which fell to us was no less than the survival of the human species. Without memories, how was society to function? How does a man rise in the morning, go to an office, and contribute toward the global machine upon which the very foundation of our society is built?
We immediately set about automating what we could. What we couldn’t automate, we watched society surrender as each of us in turn eventually contracted the virus. When the last of those with a medical background fell, we shut down the hospitals. When the last engineer came down with CDS, we ceased all our designs. When the last pilot sat weeping in front of his controls, we shut down the last airline, an instrument CDS—like all its kin before it—had surely used to its advantage.
Because we had the technology to do little else, we spent a lot of time addressing the confusion factor. Every morning, some 6 billion people wake to the terror of not knowing who they are, where they’re at, or with whom they’re sharing the bed. We scanned the palm print of every person we could find those first few years, stored the images in massive, networked databases, and fed in everything we could about those individuals. Using the GPS satellite system for a data link, we designed and distributed hand-held minicomputers, electronic diaries on which a person could record who and what he was. We wrote extensive data query software, so that an individual could enter his entire life on the computer and have it answer the most mundane of questions. With the nation’s wealth up for grabs, we manufactured and distributed them for free. We taught people how to use them. We taught them, best as we could, how to survive.